Rumpus Originals
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Joan Didion
The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others—who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can…
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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #96: The Dark Cocoon
Transformation isn’t a butterfly. It’s the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away.
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Readers Report: New Beginnings
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “New Beginnings.”
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HORN! REVIEWS: The Tiny Book of Tiny Stories: Volume 1
Another wonderful illustrated review from HORN!
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Perceptive and Prophetic
Hesperus Press collected four long-neglected critical essays for their new collection, Virginia Woolf’s On Fiction. Her criticism, like her fiction, is an utter delight.
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Total War: A Film Reminiscence
In those days, the only way to see David Lynch’s early, short films was to start or join a film club, pool resources, and rent them from some place like Facets in Chicago.
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The Rumpus Review of The Artist
Silent films, like theater, require their audience members to suspend a sense of reality, investing instead in wonder, imagination, and sensory titillation. The greatest films of the silent era were able to transform the dart of an eye, the contortion…
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A Halfway House Where No One Leaves
In three very different but equally gorgeous sections, Griffith guides us through every poetic form from sonnet to villanelle, all while examining the idea of what it means to be in one place instead of all others, what it means…