The Eyeball #27: Apocalypse Now Redux
“The purpose of war is to kill as many of the enemy’s civilians as you can until they surrender.” –Col. John Harbert John Harbert was my grandfather, my hero, a…
Rumpus Original
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In the Eye of the Hurricane
The Louisiana Skip Horack creates is both generative and broken, salvific and ruined, marked in ways large and small by Hurricane Katrina.
My Favorite Clause: Ruminations on Stuart Dybek’s Penis
“Sauerkraut Soup” from Stuart Dybek’s 1986 debut collection Childhood and Other Neighborhoods begins with a narrator waxing philosophical on the cathartic nature of bodily purge. “Puking felt like crying,” he…
Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: The Rumpus Interview With Nancy Balbirer
Nancy Balbirer’s hilarious, soulful memoir about acting, Hollywood, art, fame, and misguided relationships, Take Your Shirt Off and Cry: A Memoir Of Near-Fame Experiences is told from the perspective of…
Sex, Drugs, and Orchestra: The Importance of Metal Health and the New Iron Maiden Documentary
The Lucky 13 Saloon in Brooklyn is papered with horror movie posters and painted with a fine layer of filmy grit. A mutilated Chuckie doll straddles a Jaegermeister spout from…
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.”
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?