Rumpus Originals
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Sympathy for These Devils
Drug addicts, pimps, whores, misogynists, hoodlums… all the usual suspects inhabit the stories in Irvine Welsh’s new collection.
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Brotherly Love
My old man was like Zeus’s father Cronos: he couldn’t bear the idea that any of his children might surpass him. Life radiated from the central pulse of his scrap-metal yard; the world beyond it seemed to make him defensive…
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FUNNY WOMEN #1: The New Rumpus Humor Column: I Am Sorry That I Didn’t Write a Comedy Piece
I guess it’s time for me to get serious about writing this comedy piece. Emoticon.
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Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing
Lydia Peelle’s stories focus on scurrilous ne’er-do-wells who flail about in circumstances beyond their control.
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The Rumpus Interview With Uwem Akpan
“After the phone call from The New Yorker, I walked more than a mile to church to thank God. But then I told God I would talk to Him another time and darted home.”
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Mourning the Book
I expected to feel a sense of accomplishment when I finished Wallace Stegner’s “Angle of Repose,” but instead I felt lost, grief-stricken. It was a mixture of sadness for the main character and a fear that I might yet ruin…
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Diary of a Young Survivor
A playwright’s first novel takes on adolescence and grief in a post-9/11 world
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HAPPY LABOR DAY: AN OXYMORON
Labor Day. The Rodney Dangerfield of holidays. Nobody knows why it’s treated like the runt of the celebration litter. Maybe it has to something to do with our biological clocks being stuck on elementary school time. Deep down in our…
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If Only Nothing Would Grow
It isn’t lyrical, it isn’t fun, it isn’t a spectacle, it doesn’t beg for your attention—Nog honestly considers the absurdity and sadness of everyday life.
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Sex, Death, Facebook
I do not know this boy. He’s a friend of a Facebook friend—some girl I hated in high school, and friended so I could see how wrong her life had gone.