Rumpus Originals
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No One Is Innocent
Yiyun Li’s arresting debut novel, The Vagrants, should be required reading for anyone interested in political fanaticism and state-sponsored tyranny.
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High Fidelity: The Rumpus Review of Watchmen
It is the comic book movie equivalent of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho: a technically accurate but dramatically inert copy of its source.
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Nobody Can Enjoy Art Anymore
Vigilante justice: the new counterculture. Until it gets, like, totally commercial. That’s the premise of DeLeon DeMicoli’s novel, Lick Me, a spunky murder mystery saddled down with dull culture critique.
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How Did It Come to This?
An oral history of May 3, 1987, the day The Butthole Surfers came to Trenton, New Jersey.
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Zack Snyder
The interviewer first met Zack Snyder, director of Dawn of the Dead, 300, and Watchmen, in 1977 as 11-year-olds at a summer camp in Maine.
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The Call For Collaboration
It would be nice to think there was another model, one that could inspire a pair of young, edgy writers to walk along lonely railroad tracks, kicking rocks and running dialog back and forth for the story they were writing.
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The Shorty Q & A with Larry Smith
Larry Smith of SMITH Magazine keyed into the popularity and resonance of short, pithy bios even before “tweet” made its way firmly into the vernacular.
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Once the Shore: The Rumpus Review
When I first encountered Paul Yoon’s story, “Once the Shore,” the opening piece in Best American Short Stories 2006, I felt the rush of a new discovery. In the first paragraph, a woman tells a waiter how her husband parted…
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The Rumpus Interview with Jason Kottke
“The site was becoming unmanageable as just a hobby… so I decided I either needed to quit the site or turn it into something I could live off of… The bigger challenge was how to balance taking the site seriously…
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The Mercy Papers: A Memoir of Three Weeks
It’s a tricky thing, a memoir of a death: you know how it’s going to end. The challenge for the writer (not only with regard to the conclusion) is making the inevitable unknown.
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Yoon
One time I was reading Haruki Murakami and I thought: if I had the chance, would I ever ask him why his characters always vanish? I’m not sure I’d want to. Maybe he doesn’t know either.