The Rumpus Interview with Michael Showalter
“I am writing an ‘important’ memoir about not being able to write an important memoir. It winds up being kind of a novel-length comedic essay on insecurity and procrastination.”
Rumpus Original
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Lost in Space
For Mary Miller’s characters, the world is anything but big. These are women trapped in little towns and little lives, but the emotional resonance is limitless.
The Return of Sweetness
For Dante, Heaven sweetened souls; for Bidart, who does not believe in Heaven, sweetness comes haggard, if it comes at all.
Winston Smith Is 39
1. Winston Smith is 39. And, rereading 1984 for perhaps the fifth time, so am I.
Remembrance of Things Fast
A review of So Many Ways to Sleep Badly, by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
An Interview with Julie Vanderburg, Obsessive Reader
Julie Vanderburg is a painter, jewelry designer, and mother of three from Seattle, Washington, who is distinguished, among these other things, by the fact that she has been reading the…
The Rumpus Long Interview with Bill Ayers
The Unrepentant Terrorist? Founder of the Weather Underground, and favorite whipping boy of the failed McCain campaign, Bill Ayers talks to The Rumpus about the ’60s, the present, and his…
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…
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…
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.