Features & Reviews
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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
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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…
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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.”
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The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: The Rumpus Interview with Julian Rubinstein
Ten years ago today, Attila Ambrus (a.k.a. the “Whiskey Robber”), arguably the worst pro-hockey goalie in history, hastily twisted together a makeshift rope out of computer cables and bedsheets and escaped out a fourth story window of the Budapest City…
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The Thing Around Your Neck
In her new short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie moves back and forth between two continents the way she has in real life. Adichie depicts contemporary middle class Nigeria, as well as the…
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Childhood as a Branch of Cartography
“We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could…
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Who Needs Philosophy?
Back when I was a little boy, living in a yellow stucco house in San Diego, I would sit in the hot tub at night, under desert-clear stars, listen to the coyotes howl and ask my Dad about those dead…