Rumpus Originals
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A Day in the Life of the Real Mafia
Gomorrah is a self-conscious repudiation of gangster movies like Scarface; a reminder that the classy foot soldiers of The Godfather and the bumbling mafiosi of The Sopranos have very little to do with the real world.
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The Rumpus Interview with Carlos Serrano Azcona
“The majority of the film is realistic and the ending is more surrealistic, but for me surrealism is realism too. It’s just not as common. It’s as real as the other part of the film. The point is that what…
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Rediscovering the West
As much as these poems tap into a mythic story of the West, they are not linear narratives, but circuitous maps of anxiety and desire, a portrait of an inner world masquerading as meditations on people and place.
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The Eyes of Our Skin Are Closed
The enchantment of Dangerous Laughter is not merely a function of the tales themselves, but also of the way in which Millhauser tells them – with careful, attentive prose that is rich in detail yet never overwhelming.
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Mortals—Norman Rush’s Novel For Grown-ups
If I have learned anything from years of recommending this book, it’s this: enthusiasm, by itself, accomplishes nothing.
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The Rumpus Interview With God-des & She
“We really are grateful to be able to do this for our job, and we’re grateful we’ve been able to travel and meet all these weirdos.”
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What I Learned at AWP
The Rumpus dispatched dozens of our top reporters to Chicago. None of them were heard from again.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jacob Weisman
“You can’t just stick a rocketship on the cover of a book and expect it to sell. That’ll work for the Hard SF readership, but that’s not going to sell thousands of copies.”
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Andrew W.K.
“I used to think that you had to be in a lot more pain and going through a lot more struggle to really prove that you were working hard, but then I realized that was just working really inefficiently.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Yiyun Li
“The style in the second collection is more developed, more established. I feel like I’m more mature as a storyteller now and I also know what kind of stories I want to tell.”
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Appropriation of Fear—A Review of Friday the 13th
The Friday the 13th teenagers, including those in the franchise reboot that opens this week, are a superior breed of dumb. The kind of dumb that makes someone who knows a killer is on the loose say, “I’m not afraid!”…