Posts by: Steve Almond
Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Liz Prato
Liz Prato talks about her debut story collection, Baby’s on Fire, why she enjoys the process of revision, and what the phrase “literary citizenship” means to her.
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Julia MacDonnell
Julia was one of those “students” whom you suspect, after maybe fifteen seconds, should actually be teaching the class you are currently (allegedly) teaching.
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Along Came Polly
I taught Polly at Tin House one year. Or maybe she taught me.
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Antonia Crane, The Dirty Dozenth
And this is precisely why I was so entirely blown away by Antonia Crane’s new memoir, Spent, which chronicles her dark and twisted path through the above horrors with remarkable elegance and restraint.
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Catawampus Uber Alles!: The Rumpus Interview with Peter Mountford
Writer Peter Mountford talks about his latest novel, the impossibility of altruism, the realities of the midlife crisis, and the “catawampus” that is economics.
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Kelly Luce
If it weren’t such a goddamn cliché, I’d write something snappy like: “Kelly Luce is attempting to reinvigorate magical realism by launching a full-scale invasion of Murakami’s homeland.”
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Peter Stenson
Just like that, I knew I’d been bamboozled. Stenson could write. The rest of the story sailed past and I found hardly a single occasion to complain, which is, for Super Hot Profs, a legitimate cause for despair.
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: Brian Sousa
Every once in a great long while, you encounter a student whose devotion to reading and writing, to the language itself, leaves you humbled and speechless. Brian Sousa was not that student.
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The Rumpus Interview with Chris Castellani
Novelist Chris Castellani talks about avoiding sentimentality around the immigrant experience, letting go of the people and characters you love, and how he wrote three books while also running the writing center Grub Street.
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Why I Write Smut: A Manifesto
Because I’ve devoted perhaps eighty percent of my adult waking hours to thinking about sex, and it seems dishonest to pretend otherwise in my work.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #19: The Pressure of the Real
I was in a Starbuck’s in central Connecticut trying to think about the election
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Week in Greed #18: They Were Careless People
I remember that it was late at night and I was returning to my dorm, having just watched Ronald Reagan win re-election with an unprecedented 60 percent of the popular vote. Down the hall I could see a familiar figure lurch drunkenly.
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Week in Greed #17: Conservatives Storm the Week in Greed!
I felt it was important for Rumpus readers to hear what conservatives have to say for themselves. So I spent the past month interviewing a bunch.
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The Week in Greed #16: How to Take a Salesman to the Woodshed
Voters at home, the ones still open to voting for him, need Obama to take the fight to Romney, to speak with urgency and moral force. He needs to have lines of attack prepared for particular topics, and those attacks need to tell a larger story.
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The Week in Greed #15: Seven Unpopular Truths About Last Night’s Great Debate
1. Mitt Romney convincingly portrayed a sympathetic human being.
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The Week in Greed #14: My Job Is Not to Worry About Those People
I remember that it was a sunny day in El Paso, as it almost always was, and I was upstairs with my girlfriend in our dusty apartment when we heard someone calling to her through the window.
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Super Hot Prof-on-Student Word Sex: George Singleton
George has never studied literature with me. There’s nothing I could teach him that a good bottle of cough medicine hasn’t already.
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Steve Almond imagines the speech he wishes President Obama would give at the Democratic National Convention:
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The Week in Greed #12: Who Let the Dog Whistles Out?
The goal isn’t just to rile white voters up, but to make them feel that their own racist impulses are merely reasonable responses to a culture stacked against them.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #11: The Ayn Rand Program
I know I’m supposed to write about Paul Ryan, because he’s the new media brand, but I’m having trouble getting the guys in the Give-A-Shit Department on board.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #10: GOP Nominee Faces Agony of Deceit
Pattern of habitual lying poses challenges for Romney campaign.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #9: Triumph of the Ill
Ten years ago, in the midst of a lengthy depression, I found a lump in my lower forty and decided, with the help of my depression, that I had cancer.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #8: Explaining Taxes to a Five Year Old
One nice thing about small children is that they aren’t scared to ask questions. They haven’t completely absorbed the idea that ignorance is shameful.
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The Rumpus Interview with Chloe Caldwell
I first saw Chloe Caldwell do her thing a year ago. She read an essay about an orgy she’d participated in and how much she’d enjoyed the orgy, and the particular moments she’d enjoyed,
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THE WEEK IN GREED #7: The Money Shot
When I was five years old, my grandfather Irving Rosenthal, who lived in the Bronx, came out to California to visit us. One morning I asked him for a dollar.
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THE WEEK IN GREED #6: To Behave Like the Fallen World
It’s no coincidence that the one man willing to lie about his savagery as an adolescent is the one running for president.
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A few weeks ago I was in an airport and I did that dumb thing I so often do in airports, which is to retrieve a stray section of USA Today out of a fancy airport trashcan.
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Dirty tricks work in politics because it is human nature to see the worst of ourselves in others, particularly in those we feel are more powerful than we are.
...moreTHE WEEK IN GREED #3: What We Remember of the Old Country
Let’s say you work at the Renaissance Esmeralda in Indian Wells, just down the road from Palm Springs. You do maintenance stuff: irrigation, pool filters, plumbing.
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