The Candidate In Bloom
A short story from Doug Dorst’s forthcoming collection, The Surf Guru, our Rumpus Book Club pick for July.
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183 posts
Underground America: Permanent Anxiety
“The Arizona law is not the problem. The problem is that we continue, on all sides of the political spectrum, to not listen to those most directly affected by immigration…
The Eyes of Texas Are Upon You
What we’re witnessing in Arizona, and all across this country, is an ongoing moral tragedy.
All We Read Is Freaks
Who says that here, in the land of fluorescent signs, football mania, booming bass, and a Mouse with a compulsion to celebrate itself every few hours, a poet can’t still strike a nerve?
Heart Radical: The Strange, True Flight of Airships
Barry Hannah passed away Monday, March 1, 2010. He was 67 and died of natural causes. The precarious state of his health — he’d battled cancer for some years —…
A Candy Box of History’s Sappiest Literary Lovers
Familiar figures among upper echelon literary lovelorn include Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, Robert Louis Stevenson and Fannie Osbourne, Gerard de Nerval and Jenny Colon, to name but a few. Their…
Merry Christmas
It didn’t surprise me to learn that Americans send out a billion and a half Christmas cards every year. That would have been my guess, give or take a quarter…
Henry Miller in Lotos Land: Paint as You Like, and Die Happy
Thinking back on his first stay in Hollywood, Miller often reminisced about the Green House, “where I made so many watercolors, sold them for a song or for an umbrella…
Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt
The year I met Steve Almond was also the year I picked up (Not That You Asked) and the year I read his gorgeous homage to Kurt Vonnegut, “Everything Was…
On the Importance of Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling
A couple of years ago the memoirist and fiction writer Chris Offutt urged me to read Don Carpenter’s Hard Rain Falling, first published in 1966. As promised, it was the…
Listen to Metal on Metal and Everything Will Be Okay
Just because you don’t succeed the way others define success, you’re not a failure. You just chose to take a different path. And who’s to say that’s wrong? I just…
The Rumpus Interview with Lydia Millet
When asked why I publish what I publish, I often reply—I publish in order to understand why I published. Until a book goes out into the world to be engaged…