Columns
-
Vonnegut and the Shapes of Stories
As Jerome Stern showed with his writing guide Making Shapely Fiction, stories have shapes. Kurt Vonnegut thought so too, and, inspired by the similarities between the profiles of the New Testament and “Cinderella,” he plotted out several of those shapes in his…
-
Spotlight: Ali Shapiro
Ali Shapiro doles out some exceedingly practical advice for job-hunting with the qualifications of a creative writer.
-
A Glimpse of Modern-Day Slavery
I am alive today because of that truck driver. He saved my life trafficking me, taking my money, selling me to another master. There is no help given for free. I was a transaction. Those are the words of a…
-
Fourteen Hills Turns Twenty
Fourteen Hills, a splendid literary journal that has published several Rumpus contributors, is turning twenty! Come celebrate their big 2-0 tomorrow at 7:00 PM at San Francisco’s Art Institute of California, where there will be a variety of wonderful readers and…
-
“This Novel Treads So Finely Between Hope and Despair”
Our essays editor Roxane Gay reviewed Mitchell S. Jackson’s The Residue Years for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and she makes it sound like one hell of a book: There is warmth and wit, and a hard-won wisdom about the…
-
Hey, That Guy Wasn’t In the Book!
Purists may cringe, but it happens: When a book is turned into a movie, some scenes and characters are shrunk or eliminated entirely, while others are expanded are introduced wholesale. Bookish has a nifty roundup of minor characters in books…
-
The Conditions of Love by Dale Kushner
Kevin O’Kelly reviews Dale Kushner’s THE CONDITIONS OF LOVE today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
-
Rumpus Video Premiere & Interview with Golden Suits
I think the part that gets me most excited is being inspired for a song by something that’s outside of music.
-
Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Oh hey, Area 51 is a for real (not terribly alien-infested) place. As a bad movie connoisseur it’s pretty great hearing Jerry Lewis talk about “The Day the Clown Cried”. Isabella Rozendaal takes pictures of modern hunting culture. Perhaps you…
-
Deep Throat #7: On Being and Unbeing a Singer
He knew what he was doing when he looked at me and said, “Sing for me.” Had I been nude in his bed I would not have been as naked as I was then, stripped down to my brand new…
-
Fanfiction Gathers Force
Ever since Fifty Shades of Grey, originally written with characters from Twilight as its protagonists, struck gold, the mainstream publishing world has had to take a closer look at fanfiction. In the (increasingly unlikely) event you’re unfamiliar with the world of fanfiction,…
-
The Feminist Reading List to End All Feminist Reading Lists
In case you missed it, Rumpus contributor Michelle Dean whipped up a superb “pop-culture feminist syllabus” at Flavorwire. Ranging from time-tested classics like Margaret Atwood’s The Edible Woman to newer but equally exciting material like Issa Rae’s The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, Dean’s…