Blogs
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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #60: The World Lit By Other People
We don’t reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #35: Alex Behr in Conversation with Terri Manning
In the late 1980s, Terri Manning and her sister, Barbara, lived in one of San Francisco’s painted ladies near Golden Gate Park. This lady, a huge, rambling Victorian with peeling paint, opened its door to touring bands, local musicians, artists, and…
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Five Mini-Interviews from The Rumpus
We at The Rumpus get bored with reading the same old interviews with the same old people. So, every now and again we like to publish “mini-interviews,” our readers talking with people we wouldn’t normally get to learn about. We like…
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Mary Pacifico Curtis: The Last Book I Loved, Grief
Andrew Holleran’s Grief is a beautifully written book that fulfills what one liner note promises, perhaps delivering the fictional version of what Joan Didion before him did in her non-fiction Year of Magical Thinking. I not only harkened back to Didion, but given…
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #34: Robert Tumas in Conversation with Brian, his BFF
When last we heard from Brian he had gotten work as a Xerox copier mechanic in his hometown of Rochester, New York. Robert Tumas’s latest conversation with his itinerant best friend finds Brian on the Island of San Clemente, off…
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THE LONELY VOICE #8: In Praise of Inaction, Bellow’s “The Old System”
I’ve been hearing the short story is dead again. The real money is in novels. Screenplays! A short story? Why don’t you go and write a haiku while you’re at it.
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“Reality, Really”
Publishers Weekly profiles Rumpus Books section editor Andrew Foster Altschul, who is also the author of this month’s Rumpus Book Club pick, Deus Ex Machina.
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The Last Book(store) I Loved: BookCourt
If you’re like me, you work a remedial day job and you spend a lot of time at said day job cruising around the Internet and reading about books. You read The New York Times Books section daily, and you…
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #33: A Touch of Goth in Old New York’s Little Italy
When your mother-in-law pushes aside Elizabeth Street, the acclaimed novel by Laurie Fabiano, and says “She didn’t get it right,” it’s time to pull up a chair and listen. Christina Randazzo tells great stories that span decades but her most…
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Early Thoughts on Deus Ex Machina
Rumpus Book Club member Jen George Burt on Deus Ex Machina. ** I think Deus Ex Machina is a modern greek tragedy – a creation myth of the new social contract. Deus Ex Machina is Latin for “god out of…
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Ted Wilson reviews the World #65
GAYLE KING ★★★★★ (2 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Gayle King.
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Daniel Roberts: The Last Book I Loved, The Secret History
In 2010, half of which I spent in grad school, I read scores of novels and short story collections, and liked many of them. I adored Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned. I couldn’t put down Let the Great World Spin or McCarthy’s C. But…