A Sunny Day is a Sufficient Cathedral
The book’s strongest moments are often its quietest, as when the complexity of the speaker’s engagement with himself and the world is repulsed or rerouted by automatic prompts and alienation.
Rumpus Originals
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The Rumpus Interview with James McMurtry
I call James McMurtry late one morning when I’m visiting Austin, Texas. By now, I’ve seen him play three times, in Arkansas, Oklahoma, and California, and I’m always struck by…
The Queer Zoo
Shannon Cain’s short story collection, The Necessity of Certain Behaviors, offers a refreshingly agnostic and all-embracing perspective on sexual desire and identity.
THE LONELY VOICE #15: Be Aware of Your Own Ridiculousness, A Small Tribute to Václav Havel
That Václav Havel’s death was overshadowed by Kim Jong Il, that loopy coward, is a joke that might have made Havel, the writer, laugh. Idiot tyranny finally pays him back…
Wet Matches
I was waiting for her. I’d found the only room I could afford near the Prado in a pension that was being run as a transvestite brothel.
Synapses Erupt Like Sparrows
In Sancta, divinity irradiates. The afterlife approaches nuclear, dangerous and fascinating, a mysterium tremendum fascinans that can kill you with overexposure.
The Rumpus Review of Shame
Beneath Shame’s veneer of soulless chic and artful grit, there’s an urgency that’s like an infant’s cry: blunt yet piercing, aware only of its own pain.
The Drugs Do Work
Strange, surreal and occasionally macabre, the new short-fiction anthology The Speed Chronicles offers a primer on a class of illicit substances—and a category of human experience—at once painful and joyous.
FUNNY WOMEN #71: My Attempts at Sexting
My boyfriend recently informed me that I might be approaching this “sexting” trend wrong. I’m not sure if I agree.