Features & Reviews
-
Why I Write
A 20 page essay on “Why I Write” by Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott. Part memoir/part tips and insight. $3 from Scribd, read online or download. (He says he’s going to publish it on The Rumpus at some point, so you…
-
Shya Scanlon Experiments with Web Serialization
Beginning this Thursday, Shya Scanlon will be serializing his sci-fi novel, Forecast, in semi-weekly installments across 42 web journals and blogs. Forecast is a sci-fi tale of relationships and identity under constant surveillance. The novel opens in a world where…
-
Blogging for Book Deals
What do Look at this Fucking Hipster, Postcards from Yo Momma, Stuff White People Like, I Can Has Cheezburger, and Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, have in common (you know, aside being online sensations)? Book deals. Many bloggers, especially…
-
The Magic Hour
Reading such a dense novel can feel like being in the backseat of a car traveling nonstop through a safari, with a reader wanting to stop and poke around a bit, maybe get a little more explanation from the tour…
-
The Un-formulaic Life of the Man Who Invented the Movie Formula
Wycliffe A. Hill is the grandfather of the cookie cutter Hollywood movie. Author of Ten Million Photoplay Plots: The Master Key to All Dramatic Plots, which was published in 1919, Hill created an assembly line approach to writing screenplays: character…
-
The Worst Words Ever
“What word do you hate and why?” That was the question posed to poets this year at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. Answers ranged from chillax (ugh) to redact (yuck) to appall. And Phillip Wells’ explanation of hatred for the word…
-
Monkeys Know Bad Grammar When They Hear It
It’s not like they’re gonna be writing for The New Yorker anytime soon, but a team of scientists just published a study in the journal Biology Letters saying that monkeys can “recognize bad grammar.” Researchers spent a day familiarizing a…
-
The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
It’s summertime. BookExpo is in the past. Writers have taken a little break from accosting critics. The book blogs finally have some free time. And like most people, they are spending that time poking around the Internet and finding lots…
-
The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
It’s Sunday again, which means that my Grandmother is pacing impatiently somewhere beyond the grave, worrying about the fate of my immortal soul.
-
Beautiful Horrible
“I like to see the most aggressive of [horror movies]—Dawn of the Dead, for instance—as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators
-
Tom Treanor: The Last Book I Loved, Music for Torching
A. M. Homes’ Music for Torching is a hard sell: A suburban couple in spitting distance of forty find themselves each in the middle of a midlife crisis. What can possibly be told anew in a frame like that? This…
-
Don’t Be a Coward: The Rumpus Interview with Philipp Meyer
“All of us, all the time, are searching for some order in the world/universe/our lives. We’re searching for guiding principles and explanations. Especially in times of stress, we tend to find sayings, aphorisms, mantras to help guide us.”