Rumpus Original
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We the Animals
We the Animals, the beautiful debut novel from Justin Torres, moves in small moments. Tiny chapters, spare prose, and meticulous sentences take us through the complicated, messy childhood of three brothers.
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Donnie Darko and the Tyranny of the Franks
Perhaps the most enduring movies are those that tempt us into deep interpretation even as they resist all efforts to impose meaning on them.
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I’m Nothing If Not Polite
Notes From Irrelevance is a long weave of sentence shimmers with influences of someone who has read and absorbed a rich range, from classics to the most experimental, making each phrasing kinetic with questions about the way he has experienced…
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Poetry Kung Fu or: Breaking Boards With Your Head is Dumb, Write Poems Instead
Part 1: The Student Bruce Lee wrote poetry and it is beautiful.
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A Zinester’s Journey
Anne Elizabeth Moore’s travel memoir, Cambodian Grrrl, is a humourous, self-effacing tale of an American abroad.
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What Is Already Living: Author, Autobiography and Fiction in the Age of Social Networking
WRITE YOUR STORY reads the advertising placard for corporate octopus Citibank on display in the Union Square subway station in Manhattan. The campaign’s thrust appears to be this: by spending money, being a consumer, one, in fact, indites a story…
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #104
KERMIT THE FROG ★★★★★ (3 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Kermit the Frog.
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The Rumpus Interview with Kirsten Kaschock
I met Kirsten Kaschock twelve years ago when we were new graduate students in creative writing in the Syracuse University MFA program—she, in poetry; I, in fiction. She was pregnant at the time; a few days later, she gave birth…
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Fingers Through Sweat-Curled Hair
Biddinger’s repeated returns to haptic perception as a legitimized approach to the divine, or a sense of peace or benediction, amounts to an aesthetic necessity, alongside the necessity of putting iconicity and holy writ in relationship with narrative, reality, and…
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Albums of Our Lives: Steve Martin’s Let’s Get Small
“Well, excuuuuuuuuuse me!” my mother says from the kitchen when we complain about baked chicken again. “Well excuuuuuuuuuuuse me!” grumbles my father when we change the channel from the Auburn game to Elvira’s Movie Macabre.
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DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #86: Tiny Revolutions
Real change happens on the level of the gesture.