THE LONELY VOICE #4: John Edgar Wideman Confronts
Some stories cut so close you can only tell them in shards.
Features & Reviews
9281 posts
The Last Book I Loved: Bleak House
Bleak House is a magnificent book, surprising and delightful and heartbreaking and wild.
I’ve Always Wondered Where The Black Hats
Get their black hats. Same place as Gay Talese. Homburgs, fedoras, no creases, creases — Bruno Lacorazza is a name you can trust. Hasidic hats even get hasidic-ish style names:…
Exquisite Corpses
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford’s Facebook status messages are queries for the world, not just for his friends. In a special Rumpus bricolage, we are pleased to present Ariane…
Rabbit Reduxion – Looking back at Updike
In the wake of losing several authors of extreme significance this last year, David Foster Wallace, Studs Terkel, and now John Updike, a bevy of reflection floods in. Search for…
The Best Music is Made of Subtraction
Like the Jazz, Blues, and R&B music Brown references, these poems are born of heartbreak, explorations of love and violence, connections and disconnections, the vast complications of body and heart.
Malcolm Gladwell and ESPN Banter, Rumpus Gets Smarter
“My goal in life,” says Malcolm Gladwell in an interview with Bill Simmons on ESPN, “is to get to the place that I can take the same idea and just…
Daphne Merkin’s literary depression
There is a peculiar quality to “A Journey Through Darkness,” Daphne Merkin’s memoir of chronic depression published this week in the Times Magazine. Her intimate account of lifelong struggle with…
What Is Found
In Patrick Somerville’s novel, an expectant father must decide what kind of man he wants to be.
Google, Kindle, and The Library of Babel
Technological innovation seems almost strangely commonplace these days, from say, contact lenses that could layer data directly onto your view of the world to robots fighting far-flung wars to computer…
The Great American Novel in Miniature
Lurking beneath the dazzling political and pop-culture fireworks of Benjamin Taylor’s second novel, The Book of Getting Even, is a vivid tale of American displacement and discovery that could be…