Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
Here’s hoping you were too busy attending panels and buying Write Like A Motherfucker mugs at this year’s AWP to read The Rumpus this weekend. And here’s hoping you’ll read the two spectacular essays we ran right now. The first…
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We Still Have A Long Way to Go
A grim reminder of one of the reasons we still need things like International Women’s Day: the suggestion that men should take responsibility for not raping women is apparently outrageous. At Salon, Mary Elizabeth Williams tells the story of Zerlina…
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The Health-Care Article That Might Give You A Heart Attack
If you haven’t yet read the Time exposé of the American health-care industry, you’re missing out. It’s easy to see that something’s wrong with the way we do health care in the United States, but hard to understand just how deep…
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Happy International Women’s Day!
In 1909, the Socialist Party of America marked the anniversary of a garment workers’ strike by declaring February 28 National Women’s Day. A few years later, on the other side of the globe, a Women’s Day demonstration for bread and…
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The Next Letter in the Mail: Alix Ohlin
Woohoo! The next Letter in the Mail, going out next Friday, is from Alix Ohlin! Alix Ohlin is the author of two short-story collections (Babylon and Other Stories and Signs and Wonders) and two novels (The Missing Person and Inside). According to the…
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Experiment with Literature
If you’ve grown up on canonical realist fiction, it can take a while to get used to the taste of experimental literature. But LitReactor’s Cath Murphy, after enduring slander against her adventurous side no less vicious than “Cath never likes…
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“Trying to Illuminate the Darkest Places”
Two Rumpus treasures in one…treasure chest? Necklace? Treasury?? Okay, this metaphor didn’t work out, but Thomas Page McBee‘s interview of Cheryl Strayed (aka Dear Sugar) did. A small preview: But what I’ve found as a writer is that every time I…
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Keeping the Doctor Away
Though the apples in your local supermarket may seem homogeneous (they are, in fact, clones), wild apples come in a shocking number of sizes, colors, and flavors. Intrigued by their variety, artist Jessica Rath embarked on a multiyear project photographing…
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New DFW Books: Both A Good Idea and Not
Both Flesh and Not, the latest posthumous David Foster Wallace book, has been released, and Rumpus pal Andrew Altschul has written an extensively titled essay about it for the Quarterly Conversation. In it, he explores with a springy verbosity not unlike Wallace’s…
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The Evolution of Language
How did humans learn to talk, anyway? Vervet monkeys use different words (or, at least, “different alarm calls to refer to different types of predators, such as snakes and leopards”) but don’t arrange them into diverse kinds of sentences. Songbirds,…
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Kurt Vonnegut Loved Adobe Books, And You Should Too
Here’s a lovely addition to the ongoing up-again-down-again saga of Adobe Books: Herbert Gold describes Kurt Vonnegut’s last trip to San Francisco, during which the two visited the “eternal no-rent bookshop.” Vonnegut ended up signing a $1.95 used copy of Slaughterhouse…