Posts by author
Lauren O’Neal
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A Memoirist’s Pact with the Reader
At Salon, Dani Shapiro writes an open response to a reader who felt that Shapiro’s memoir Slow Motion wasn’t fully honest because it didn’t include all the details of her life. In it, she explains what memoir is and isn’t, and what honesty…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
We’ve had a busy couple weekends at the Rumpus lately, and we wanted to make sure nobody missed any of the spectacular essays and book reviews we’ve been posting. For example, this weekend we reviewed Bradley L. Garrett’s urban-exploration treatise Explore…
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The Repercussions of Modern-Day Witch Trials
We like to think mass hysteria about black magic in the US died with the Salem witch trials, but 300 years afterward, starting in the 1980s, childcare providers across the country were accused of “Satanic abuse.” One such case involved…
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Atavist Books to Launch with Karen Russell Novella
Atavist, a media and software company responsible for some truly stunning longform nonfiction pieces, is branching out. March 2014 will mark the launch of Atavist Books, and their first title will be Sleep Donation, a novella by Rumpus interviewee and MacArthur…
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“Mellifluent Instances” of Language
“Cellar door” isn’t the only euphonious phrase in the English language. For Printers Row, the Chicago Tribune‘s literary journal, Michael Robbins catalogs some of the “perfectly strung-together words” that have the power to “delight the ear.” And though he starts with a…
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Women Who Run with the Wolves (and Pandas and Gorillas and Whales)
It’s a trend you may never have noticed, but it exists: “women—attractive, single, childless women—have long been coupled with exotic animals. Gentle women and wild animals are linked in myth and fable, fashion photography and pornography, pulp art and fine…
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Terry’s Fabrics Maps Out Homes of Classic Literature
Following the example of Movoto, the real-estate company which used details from the Harry Potter books to appraise the Weasley family home, another UK company is using homes in classic books as a fun bit of publicity.
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All-American Pan-Asian Chinese Food
For Hyphen magazine, Jenny Lee writes about the all-American tradition of eating Chinese food on holidays, especially for immigrant families. Not just any Chinese food, either—Lee favors the classic low-cost Chinese buffet, with its mix of foods from across and beyond…
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Tournament of Books X Begins!
Get ready for the Morning News’s tenth annual Tournament of Books, a “March Madness–style battle royale” to determine which work of fiction will reign supreme (though the site is careful to note that the competition “is not an attempt to…
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Nabokov vs. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
“When Nabokov started translating [his English-language memoir] into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when he was writing it in English, and so in essence it became a somewhat different book,” Pavlenko says. At…
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“It’s Always Condescending and Insulting”
At Rookie, wunderkind Tavi Gevinson’s website for teenage girls, Hazel Cills has a magnificent defense of teenage girls’ taste, which explains why adult male critics are the last people who should be passing judgment on media for young women. When you…
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“I Loved Them So Much I Can’t Bear to Read Them Again”
You don’t have to read a book over and over again to love it. In fact, argues Molly Labell, sometimes it’s best to read it only once. Rereading Housekeeping — a relic from a sadder, stranger time during which I was…