Literary Fashionables: The Absurdist and the Word Portraitist
This week in New York, white tents are set up behind the New York Public Library in Bryant Park. It is called Fashion Week because it is a celebration of…
Features & Reviews
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The Rumpus Interview with David Shields
David Shields attempts to demolish the foundations of literature in his latest, "Reality Hunger: A Manifesto." His target: the culture.
No Wi-Fi: A Very Short Q&A with Alan from Borderlands Cafe
A couple weeks back, I was in a bad way. I’d recently joined Twitter, was always on Facebook, and checked my email (and I don’t exaggerate) about 75 times a…
“Shakespeare would have eased off the puns”
“What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the…
The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Happy sexin’ day, everyone! This isn’t my favorite holiday, so I’m gonna let the Book Bench do all the talkin’ about it with these Dear John letters and some blogging on emails…
The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
This week, Rumpus Books reviewed a book on Girl Power and the music of the nineties, a novel about the American dream, and an homage to Sylvia Plath.
A Candy Box of History’s Sappiest Literary Lovers
Familiar figures among upper echelon literary lovelorn include Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fannie Osbourne, Gerard de Nerval and Jenny Colon, to name but a few. Their…
The Rumpus Short Interview with Guy Raz: “Three-Minute Fiction”
When Guy Raz officially became the weekend host of NPR’s All Things Considered last summer, two of his goals were to make the show more interactive and to somehow get…
“We Got Lost for a While”
“[The Ticking is the Bomb] pushes readers to acknowledge, if not meditate on, the urges lurking inside us, those we tamp down in order to continue, to resist the impulses…
The Rumpus Valentine’s Day Review of Drenched
[T]he universe of Marisa Matarazzo’s first book is soaked through, awash in torrential love and water.
“Feeling Like I Was Getting Somewhere.”
“My own path into writing songs comes directly through literature. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a capital-A author, and I wrote short stories on an old…
Cars are Always Funny and So are Landlords and Sex
“The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that…