Forever Changeless: The Beach Boys, The Smile Sessions
In June of 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out. Brian Wilson is said to have heard it and wept. Wilson, the Beach Boys’ main songwriter, producer, erstwhile…
Rumpus Original
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The Last City I Loved: Chicago
It depends on the definition of love, of course. You can spend a week in a city and ache at the sight of its balconies, be imprinted forever with the…
A Brilliant Button Without Any Cloth
The promised west in The Oregon Trail IS The Oregon Trail is an amalgam of bootstrap romance, wilderness bordered by suburban sprawl, death, and the ferocity of natural processes.
THE WEEK IN GREED #5: The Willy Loman Vote
A few weeks ago I was in an airport and I did that dumb thing I so often do in airports, which is to retrieve a stray section of USA…
I Used to be Epic Spittle
It’s the project of the impossible, then, that makes Yau’s new collection so provocative and provoking, so worth reading, even for a reader’s or poet’s temperament that might be different…
The Rumpus Interview with Lawrence Weschler Regarding the Death of Wislawa Szymborska
Wislawa Szymborska died on Feb. 1 this year. Born in Poland 1923, Szymborska lived through the political tumults of the 20th century, but her poetry stubbornly presented the individual conscience…
Albums of Our Lives: Tori Amos’s Strange Little Girls and Little Earthquakes
I was fourteen when Strange Little Girls was released and I was fifteen when my parents decided to separate.
The Rumpus Interview with Matt Bell
“Domina, Doreen, Dorma,” published in Everyday Genius, was the first of the stories which make up Cataclysm Baby to surface. Since then, what eventually became a novella puzzled itself out…
The Greatest Show
In this intricately woven short story collection, The Greatest Show, Michael Downs tells the sad long story of crumbling American cities through the lens of a tragic circus fire of…
Night of the Lilies
The Polk Inn stood out in the tenderloin because of all the beige and glass next to junkies selling stolen bicycles and gizmos out front.
Held Together By Sinews
Kinsella describes; he does not prescribe. He rests less comfortably in his retreat than Thoreau and without the surety that he lives an exemplary life.
The Rumpus Interview with Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman’s The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them combines genres to tell stories about Batuman’s adventures as a graduate student.