Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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The Art of the Novella Subscription Series
Forget magazines—for a small subscription fee, Melville House will send you two novellas every month in whatever format you prefer. It’s the perfect way to finally get around to reading classics like Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart and Leo Tolstoy’s…
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Sandy Hates Books
Hurricane Sandy hates books, according to the name of a relief fundraiser at the powerHouse arena in Brooklyn this Saturday. Although it seems unwise to anger Sandy any further (and perhaps unfair to expect a meteorological phenomenon to have an…
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“As Much Fun As A Creative Person Can Have”
Kickstarter interviewed our very own Stephen Elliott about Happy Baby, the first feature film from The Rumpus. A preview: This time I’m going to edit the movie myself, with feedback from Kickstarter backers, and take as long as it takes.…
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Put Some Flash Fiction in Your Headphones
Story Tapes is a new podcast created by Bay Area writers Eliza Smith and Faith Gardner to showcase flash fiction. In the past few months, they’ve featured writers reading their own work and others’, as well as answering interview questions…
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The 51st State?
What if Puerto Rico becomes a state? What if our flag looks like this? What if we have to change that “fifty nifty United States” song to “fifty-one nifty, fun United States”? Puerto Rico would get federal aid, but they’d…
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Hot Jazz, No Cash
Online library Internet Archive has a free collection of jazz tracks from the ’20s. What hepcat among us doesn’t remember doing the Charleston to such classics as “dardan2.ogg,” “pretgirl.ogg,” or “urbones.ogg”? Wil Wheaton says, “If you liked the music in…
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Safe Sex Onscreen and Off
Yeah, yeah, Obama, hurray(!) and stuff. What we were all really dying to know is if Measure B would pass in Los Angeles County. The answer is yes, it did, and porn actors will now be required to wear condoms…
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A Week in the Life of an LGBT Writer
Lambda Literary feature “The Banal and the Profane” returns with a post by Leon Baham. Each installment involves an LGBT writer chronicling a week of life day by day, and Baham also organizes things alphabetically; his topics range from “Adult…
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The Journalist and the Censor
Eveline Chao has a fascinating longform article up at Foreign Policy about navigating government censorship while working at an English-language business magazine in China. You can’t say “Tiananmen,” but “June 1989” is all right. The headline “China’s ailing healthcare system—and…
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Spinster Aunt Starts New Blog
Remember “spinster aunt and gentleman farmer” Twisty Faster? Her blog I Blame the Patriarchy, a perpetual source of fantastic writing and radical feminism, has grown quieter and quieter these past several months, due, according to her sidebar, to “[t]he crushing…
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Migraines, Music, and Drugs: Oliver Sacks on Hallucinations
NPR Books has a fascinating interview with Oliver Sacks on his new book Hallucinations. An excerpt on hallucinations during migraines: …At least on two occasions, I’ve had a smell — in particular a smell of hot buttered toast — with…
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Peter Orner Reading Thursday
Bay Area readers, listen up: Rumpus columnist Peter Orner is doing a reading Thursday evening at 5:00 in UC Berkeley’s Morrison Library as part of the Story Hour series. Will he read from his latest novel Love and Shame and…