Rumpus Originals
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Walt Whitman’s Watering Hole: Pfaff’s Cellar, NYC
Whitman became a regular at Pfaff’s after getting fired from the Brooklyn Daily Times in 1859. The years before the Civil War were a decadent period where Whitman played the bon vivant, finding friends and lovers among the New York…
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The Queen of Flash Fiction
In curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Kim Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America. Life is already hard, but attempts at intimacy (what many of the people in these pages seek) do not always further the…
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GENERATION GAP #4: Sexting in the 18th Century
About a year after the breakup, I started keeping a text message journal.
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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #42: No is Golden
But as you are surely aware, forgiveness doesn’t mean you let the forgiven stomp all over you once again.
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The Private Lives of Trees
The second novella by Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, one of the “Bogotá 39” influential Latin American writers, uses metafiction to tell a delicate, emotionally complex story.
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The Rumpus Review of Make Way for Tomorrow
A Depression-era drama about bankruptcy and aging and the quiet moral failures of the petit bourgeois, Make Way for Tomorrow is the anti-Avatar.
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10/40/70 #14: Blair Witch and House of Leaves
This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine the Blair Witch Project and compare it with the novel…
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Time Loops, Child Molesters, and Sparkly Tube Tops
McGlynn’s book follows an almost fairy-tale-type logic – the unknowing past-self of the narrator plays the part of the last wife of Bluebeard, searching out the hidden rooms, with the watching future-self unable to keep her from finding the closet…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jerry DeCicca of The Black Swans
“I wish we were more popular so I could play in theaters and make albums with Daniel Lanois, but we’re lucky we get this much.”