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.
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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 day. I couldn’t stand it, but I also couldn’t stop.…
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“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 sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way…
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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 and romance. Carolyn Kellogg at Jacket Copy points us in…
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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.
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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 stories have all the poignancy, drama, humor and pathos of…
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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 a professor from Harvard who he really admired involved. He…
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“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 (conscious or not) to hurt ourselves, the ones we love,…
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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.
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“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 Royal typewriter all the time. That was how I spent…
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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 life should be reshaped into a self-repeating mechanism (it’s no…
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San Francisco’s Demographic Shift
“San Francisco’s Marcus Books has long been a gathering place for African-American authors such as Maya Angelou. But last year, manager Blanche Richardson faced the realization that the 50-year-old bookstore might have to close, the victim of a mix of…