I Live in a Hut by S. E. Smith
J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield famously said that the mark of a great author is whether, after reading their work, you want to call them up to talk, want to gab…
Features & Reviews
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Conversations with Literary Ex-Cons: J.M. Benjamin
J.M. Benjamin spent more than twelve years in state and federal prisons in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. But he read and read in prison, and eventually wrote more than a dozen urban fiction novels.
Between Heaven and Here, by Susan Straight
Susan Straight has remarkable range as a writer. Her voice can be elegant in the rhythms and vocabulary of her narrative, yet also blunt and raw in dialogue. In her…
The Rumpus Interview with David Abrams
David Abrams served for twenty years in the U.S. Army. He talks to us about his debut novel, Fobbit, a tragicomic rendering of things he observed in Baghdad.
Letters From Robots by Diana Salier
I am not impressed with writers who refuse to use punctuation or capitalization; that gimmick has been famously used already, so now it comes across as lazy and unoriginal. Also,…
Second Acts: Delmore Schwartz
Stories by Delmore Schwartz are not nearly as abundant as stories about Delmore Schwartz. While the latter may be more amusing, they are ultimately tragic, for that is how Schwartz…
The Rumpus Interview with Krys Lee
I wasn’t surprised to read recently that Junot Díaz, in last week’s New York Times Sunday Book Review, named Krys Lee’s story collection, Drifting House, as one of the two best he’d recently read.
Tall, Slim & Erect, by Alex Forman
Three quarters of the way through Alex Forman’s multimedia paean to presidential minutiae, Tall, Slim & Erect: Portraits of the Presidents, you hit this candid entry from Harry Truman’s 1947…
Fragile Acts by Allan Peterson
The cover of Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts, in print and as eBook, is as visually compelling as the cover of Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, An Index, the first poetry selection in…
Four New Messages, by Joshua Cohen
It’s hard to write well about the Internet. This is partly, as many have noted, because life on a screen is already mediated, so to write about these corners of…
The Rumpus Interview with Davy Rothbart
Somehow I had missed that Davy Rothbart, the creator of FOUND Magazine, was also a short story writer, essayist, and documentary filmmaker.
David S. Atkinson: A Rumpus Book Club Member Reviews We Only Know So Much
Elizabeth Crane’s We Only Know So Much focuses on the lives of a bunch of messed up people. Really messed up people, in fact. Okay, there’s a great deal more…