Crossing State Lines: An American Renga edited by Bob Homan and Carol Muske-Dukes
I first discovered Renga: A Chain of Poems (Brazillier, 1972) in a used bookstore in New York during my first year of graduate school. I was transfixed.
Features & Reviews
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“The Festival of Earthly Delights,” by Matt Dojny
When asked by Necessary Fiction to describe the research for his debut novel, The Festival of Earthly Delights, Matt Dojny hand-wrote a scrawling response filled with oddities, doodles, and this…
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan
Kevin Nolan reviews Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan today in Rumpus Books.
The Rumpus Interview with Elizabeth Gilbert
This is how I think of it: there’s a contract between you and the mystery. And the mystery is the thing that brings life to the work.
The Finest Wife
When Rose was sixteen years old and five months pregnant, she won a beauty pageant in South Texas, based on her fine walk up a runway in a sweet navy-blue bathing suit. This was shortly before the war. She had been a skinny, knee-scratching kid only the summer earlier, but her pregnancy had just delivered her this sudden prize of a body.
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Elizabeth Moore
"The phrase 'global citizen' always gets tossed around with my work, and part of it is that, clearly, talking about being a global citizen is the only way we can talk about participating in globalization without feeling like assholes."
How We All Lose
Discussions about gender are often framed as either/or propositions. Men are from Mars and women are from Venus, or so we are told, as if this means we’re all so…
“The Girls of Peculiar” by Catherine Pierce
There is a canon of cinema that revolves around girls leaving girlhood, and finding themselves young and nubile, ready (so they think) to embrace their future as women. There’s the…
“Diving Belles,” by Lucy Wood
The very act of writing is a kind of magic. Small black etchings on paper conjure up worlds, people, events, transporting you, the reader, to a different place, a different…
The Rumpus Review of Building Stories
A sort of deconstructed graphic novel, Building Stories is a box that contains 14 different kinds of reading material, including books, pamphlets, and newspapers, among other bits and bobs.
“Robinson Alone” by Kathleen Rooney
First things first: you don’t have to be a fan of Weldon Kees to enjoy this book. Shameful confession: until I read the note that precedes the table of contents,…
The Rumpus Interview with Michael Lowenthal
Michael Lowenthal’s new novel, The Paternity Test, goes well beyond questioning whether two guys should be allowed to walk down the aisle together. It asks what they are willing to risk to stay married.