“Trouble on the way, and great joy”
In a place where names are lost like household objects, and white noise supplants meaningful distinctions between voices and people, why the need for singularity (or personhood) at all?
Features & Reviews
9281 posts
Thomas Pynchon’s Summer Read
Inherent Vice is “a noir-like novel set in Los Angeles at the end of the 1960s” that follows “a dope-smoking private detective named Larry ‘Doc’ Sportello.” It is 384 pages…
Hoping Things End Safely: The Rumpus Interview with Hyejin Kim
North Korean women risk their lives to escape across the border to China, where they often face lives of indentured servitude and the ever-present fear of being outed by the…
The Last Book I Loved: Walking Dead Comics
I’ll tell you something that’s total crack, is the Walking Dead Comics. I’ve been reading a lot of comics lately, and that one is amazing. Also, there’s a guy named…
Rumpus Radio
The Lonely Voice has a podcast: tune-in to hear Rumpus contributor Peter Orner read and discuss the opening of John Edgar Wideman’s story “Welcome.” For more of Orner’s thoughts on…
White-Washed Cover Against Writer’s Wishes
Justine Larbalestier’s thriller Liar is told from the perspective of shifty Micah, an unreliable teen who describes herself as an African-American with short nappy hair. It’s no wonder that the…
Is Michael Chabon Giving Grownups Too Much Credit?
In a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon laments the loss of a sense of adventure in childhood. “If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers…
The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs are obsessed. They really, really want to tell you everything about William Vollman and Thomas Pynchon and their new wondrous masterpieces of weird. I love both…
The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
It’s been one hell of a week for Rumpus books, complete with a review by D.A. Powell of Rachel Loden’s Dick of the Dead and an interview with Jonathan Ames. Come…
“Amazon.com is watching you.”
Amazon, we’re still mad at you. Last week, the company once again stirred waves of customer indignation when it remotely deleted copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from…
Why We Need Vampires
In the New York Times today, filmmaker and author Guillermo del Toro and coauthor Chuck Hogan –they have a novel coming out called The Strain — write about how vampires…
Roald Dahl, Man of Letters
I have read Kafka’s letters and Flaubert’s letters and Jane Austen’s letters. These authors are a part of my “adult” life. But I haven’t read the letters of authors who…