Rumpus Originals
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert Sullivan
Journalist Robert Sullivan often documents unlovely corners of the natural world: The Meadowlands (1998) turned a naturalist’s eye on a dispiriting region of northern New Jersey notable for its Mafia dumping grounds, while in Rats (2004) Sullivan gave Ratus norvegicus…
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Jessica Anthony
Jessica Anthony’s first novel, The Convalescent (McSweeney’s Books) is the first recipient of McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. It’s about a really short guy who sells meat out of a bus in Northern Virginia and is in love with…
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A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #11: The Auxiliary Father
My high school soccer coach was a Guatemalan immigrant who had made his way to the States when he was in his twenties. At first he’d earned his living as an Arthur Murray dance instructor, but that phase of his…
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An Oral History of Myself #11: Ashley
I put myself in the group home. I was in the therapist office with my mom and I said, “I give up. I’m not going to try anymore,” meaning getting along with my mom, and he suggested the group home.
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The Magic Hour
Reading such a dense novel can feel like being in the backseat of a car traveling nonstop through a safari, with a reader wanting to stop and poke around a bit, maybe get a little more explanation from the tour…
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The Two Virgins
The summer of 1983 I was nineteen-years old. I was very muscular and very blonde and had nice features. Girls liked me. I was lousy in bed but that wasn’t important back then. Anyway, I was traveling in Europe that…
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The Rumpus Interview with filmmaker Matt Tyrnaeur
Legendary clothing designer Valentino Garavani dressed everyone from Jackie Onassis to Gwyneth Paltrow, and made — and spent! — millions doing it. But why should a Rumpus reader care?
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Beautiful Horrible
“I like to see the most aggressive of [horror movies]—Dawn of the Dead, for instance—as lifting a trap door in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators
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Don’t Be a Coward: The Rumpus Interview with Philipp Meyer
“All of us, all the time, are searching for some order in the world/universe/our lives. We’re searching for guiding principles and explanations. Especially in times of stress, we tend to find sayings, aphorisms, mantras to help guide us.”
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The Ballad of the Whiskey Robber: The Rumpus Interview with Julian Rubinstein
Ten years ago today, Attila Ambrus (a.k.a. the “Whiskey Robber”), arguably the worst pro-hockey goalie in history, hastily twisted together a makeshift rope out of computer cables and bedsheets and escaped out a fourth story window of the Budapest City…
