Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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Women Still Not Equal in Writing World
VIDA, the organization that tracks the status of women in the writing world, has posted their annual count of female writers published in major literary magazines in comparison to male writers published in the same places. This year, they’ve posted…
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Roxane Gay on Selected Shorts
Rumpus essays editor Roxane Gay has a short story up on WNYC’s Selected Shorts! The episode summary describes it thusly: The heroine of Roxane Gay’s “North Country” is a young woman from Florida adjusting to the harsh winter in Michigan’s Upper…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
We ran some preetttty choice features this weekend. Such as: “Imposter Moon,” a comic by Yumi Sakugawa. And such as: “Object Lesson,” an essay by Amy Botula about the mementos we treasure, from beloved childhood stuffed animals to condom wrappers…
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NBCC Demonstrates Good Taste
Exciting news: the National Book Critics Circle has recognized two recent Rumpus interviewees with awards! One is Andrew Solomon, whom we interviewed in December. His book Far From the Tree, about parents raising children who are significantly different from them in…
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The Course Syllabi of Famous Writers
Imagine if the authors who created these syllabi for their courses were all teaching at the same school at the same time. “Who’d you get for English?” “David Foster Wallace. I hear he’s a hard grader. How about you?” “Donald Barthelme.…
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Happy Birthday, Ralph Ellison!
Happy birthday to Ralph Ellison, who would have turned 99 today. His fiction was revelatory—Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953—as were his essays on literature, music, and race. You can read a 1977 interview with him here.
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“It’s A War Zone Around There”
After a year marked by several horrific mass shootings (on the heels of other years marked by somewhat fewer horrific mass shootings), gun violence has been on all our minds. This American Life addressed the issue with a two-part episode about…
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Sometimes Bodies Are Just Bodies
For decades now, sympathetic portrayals of trans people in the media have usually made use of the same phrase: “a man trapped in a woman’s body” (or vice versa). Though it may help some cis people start to understand the…
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Off the Page and Into the Microphone
From Novels to Notes is a new blog by journalist Johnny Garcia chronicling songs inspired by fiction or poems. It’s still getting started, but it looks promising: there are already two entries about PJ Harvey, and there are bound to…
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Strunk and White Strike Again
Strunk and White’s Elements of Style has a soft spot in all our hearts, but some of its rules—no adverbs, an incorrect definition of passive voice—are a little…idiosyncratic. If, as Constance Hale says, the point of grammar is to produce better…
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Ang Lee Opts Not to Forget Dream
How does a young Taiwanese immigrant to the United States hold onto his filmmaking dream through years of rejection and low-paying drudgery? The answer for Ang Lee: a kickass wife. Lee won his second Best Director Oscar on Sunday, but…
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Laughably Good Books
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? A Bad Idea I’m About to Do. I Feel Bad About My Neck. The titles of comedy books almost make a good blog post just by themselves. But if you want to learn more…