Rumpus Originals
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert McKee
Robert McKee is best known to the world in two ways: as the guy who teaches the popular STORY seminar in Los Angeles and around the world to would-be screenwriters, and as the character in the film Adaptation who teaches…
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The Hurricane and the War
A new book about a soldier who murdered his girlfriend examines the similar traumas of combat veterans and Katrina survivors.
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A Connoisseur of Clouds, a Meteorologist of Whims: The Rumpus Interview with Paul Auster
I don’t know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t have to.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #17: Higher Love
Recently, I was given an assignment by Rumpus film critic and friend Ryan Boudinot to write about one of those pieces of music that is so execrable, so thoroughly gangrenous, that it’s nearly impossible to figure out why anyone would…
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Accomplices in Her Accomplishment
As much as Intruder makes us look at the difficult, the painful, the ugly, it also gives us a chance to watch the insides of a snow globe swirl, to enjoy beauty in all its victory, through images, rhythms and…
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Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry Corner #7: Sartre, You’re Such an Asshole
(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995) Sartre, You’re Such an Asshole You thought your derriere off, no beef there. But your heart: was it missing a valve or something? Why do all your plays end in…
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The Rumpus Interview with Eddie Campbell
Eddie Campbell is about to release a comic that will probably be world-renowned. It’s a compendium of his Alec books, titled Alec: The Years have Pants, which have long been recognized within a statistically insignificant community as some of the…
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A Vowel Away From Master
These poems often resist the reader in the same way his speaker resists his father, but the book’s exploration of such distance creates a closeness between the reader and the poems, and the speaker and his father, that’s almost too…
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Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
The year I met Steve Almond was also the year I picked up (Not That You Asked) and the year I read his gorgeous homage to Kurt Vonnegut, “Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt.”