King James and the Battle for the Novel
There’s a sizable new interview with James Wood, polemical literary critic extraordinaire, up on LA Weekly. Colson Whitehead has spoofed him, Walter Kirn has mocked him, and there’s even a…
Features & Reviews
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Is Marriage Obsolete?
In the current issue of The Atlantic, the newly-divorced Sandra Tsing Loh wonders out loud “isn’t the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?” but then holds off a little from answering…
J.M.G Le Clezio’s The Book of the Flights
Second Place in the Rumpus College Book Review Contest Apparently it’s now possible, forty years after the first release of The Book of Flights, to see experimental fiction—like Marxism, feminism,…
FUBAR Nation
Chelsea Martin’s strange collection of miscellany evokes the loneliness of life lived through technology.
Two-for-One at the Pyramid of the Sun
David Lida’s book about Mexico City, First Stop in the New World, contains a really impressive chapter which traces the history of daily commerce in the capital from the vast…
The Rumpus Interview with Colum McCann
“Every novel is a failure. You can never achieve what you truly want to achieve. That thing you dreamt on the riverbank is never the thing you achieve when you…
Measuring the Weight of Loss
A post-romantic poet not content to wax sentimental on idealized Nature, a la Mallarmé, Andrew Michael Roberts has staked his tent in her decimated domain.
Happy Bloomsday!
Today is the 105th anniversary of Leopold Bloom’s one-day passage through the ordinary streets of Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Dubliners and Joyce-lovers around the world are celebrating the author…
The Rumpus Interview with Cecil Woolf
Cecil Woolf, 82, nephew of Leonard and Virginia Woolf, is the publisher of the Bloomsbury Heritage, a series of monographs that cover a wide variety of subjects concerning the members…
Chris Corrigan: The Last Book I Loved, The Little Prince
I read The Little Prince with a broken heart and deep new scars from recent chest surgery. The surgery didn’t remove the cracked and sad organ from beneath my ribs,…
THE LONELY VOICE #6: The Rumpus Short Story Column, Death and the Dying Chekhov
The lonely voice is coming to you today from San Francisco General Hospital. I’m in the cafeteria. I come here sometimes. It’s a nice place to be distracted and the…
Reflections on Woolf and the City 2009
Walking into the 19th annual Woolf and the City conference as a non-academic fan of Virginia Woolf can be intimidating. I was in the midst of close to 250 Woolf…