The Fog of War
Robert Olmstead’s new novel demonstrates Robert E. Lee’s maxim: “It is well that war is so horrible, or we would grow to love it too much.”
Rumpus Originals
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A Paradise Built in Hell: The Rumpus Interview With Rebecca Solnit
To read one of [Solnit's] books is to slap your forehead and say, “How could I, and everyone else, have missed this?”
Genre Trap
Spanish author Javier Calvo’s novel critiques pop culture by embracing its stereotypes
Searching the Library of Babel
About six months ago, as I was nearing the end of Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions, I came across the chapter titled “Prologues to The Library of Babel.” The chapter…
The Wind Has Stopped Blowing (Your Pockets Are Filled With Wind)
It’s April and I’m back home for Passover and Easter and my brother’s birthday. I’m wandering my parents’ farm. The air is cold and I expected warm, the trees are…
Douglas Rushkoff and Life, Inc.
“For me, the idea of selling out was the worst possible thing,” says Douglas Rushkoff during a discussion with friend and fellow writer Walter Kirn one recent evening at an…
“Trouble on the way, and great joy”
In a place where names are lost like household objects, and white noise supplants meaningful distinctions between voices and people, why the need for singularity (or personhood) at all?
“And Then at the Boat Show,” a Rumpus Original Poem by John Gallaher
And Then at the Boat Show It is true, I feel, that I don’t think about plants as much as I should. Day after day, the explanation unfolds, at just…
Hoping Things End Safely: The Rumpus Interview with Hyejin Kim
North Korean women risk their lives to escape across the border to China, where they often face lives of indentured servitude and the ever-present fear of being outed by the…
Recession Sex Workers #2: Mandy Morbid’s Sex and Death Funhouse
I met Mandy Morbid while working at Cheetahs in Hollywood, a bikini bar that attracts broke slackers with a soft spot for suicide girls and strippers who don’t think they’re…