Rumpus Originals
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The Rumpus Interview with Megan Stack
The six years Megan Stack spent in the Middle East reporting for the LA Times began as a sort of emergency assignment and ended with Every Man In This Village Is A Liar, her indelible memoir of an education in…
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An Investigation of Beautiful Objects
Sound logical reasoning would lead a person to conclude that my sustained interest in a document like Nicholas Felton’s Feltron Annual Report is sort of nuts.
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I Would Like Very Much to Hate You: A Rumpus Lamentation
My wife got upset last night, after she heard about the Rand Paul supporters who tackled a progressive activist named Lauren Valle. One of them stepped on her head. Valle suffered a concussion. The technical term is aggravated battery.
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Dear Old Dad…
Anthony De Sa’s novel imagines two lives—a father who leaves one country but fails to thrive in another, and the son who spends his life trying to figure him out.
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A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #31: Ben Roethlisberger and Flannery O’Connor
Ben Roethlisberger, the Pittsburgh quarterback disgraced last spring when a 20-year-old college student accused him of sexually assaulting her in a bar, is back on the field after serving a four-game suspension, and his Steelers are an impressive 5-1.
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Black Hole Sun
Ultimately, though, it’s the cadence of the voice that engages the reader. Slant rhyme, and skillfully enjambed couplets and tercets, are the real shakers.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #26: The Cessation of Miracles
The city of brotherly love is always reinventing itself, coming up with varieties of eccentricity meant to distract from its diet of horrors, for example, a good baseball team.
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Teleny and Camille
A story of gay erotica often traced to Oscar Wilde has been made into a luscious graphic novel, courtesy of Nefarismo illustrator Jon Macy.
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And This Is Word For Word: The Theory of Relatability and Rethinking Justin Long’s Face
There was a night last month where I couldn’t sleep. I had to be up early for another full day of screenings and filing at the Toronto International Film Festival, but my mind was cycling through a generic course of…
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #58
WHOEVER WROTE “FUCK YOU” IN THE DIRT ON MY CAR ★★★★★ (3 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing whoever wrote “fuck you” in the dirt on my…
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How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
Underneath the bleeping trappings of science fiction is a domestic drama: immigrant family, fighting parents, middle-aged father with failed dreams, sensitive son, mother in denial.