Christmas in Beirut
My family has always had a love/hate relationship with Christmas. My sisters love it, I hate it.
Rumpus Original
8548 posts
The Rumpus Interview with Luc Sante
Luc Sante is perhaps best known for his sprawling, meticulously researched nonfiction book Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York, about subterranean life among the dregs in 19th…
10/40/70 #30: Machine Gun McCain
This ongoing experiment in film writing freezes a film at 10, 40, and 70 minutes, and keeps the commentary as close to those frames as possible. This week, I examine…
Hammer Is the Prayer of the Poor and the Dying
For [Christian] Wiman, form is the fire his feet are held to. It’s the syntactic embers that burn, the linguistic flames that flare. At no point does Wiman let the reader forget he is reading poetry.
The Rumpus Interview with Rebecca Skloot
Bestselling author Rebecca Skloot is everywhere these days. Her first book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, was over ten years in the making and was recently dubbed a Notable…
Ted Wilson Reviews the World #66
BROOKSTONE ★★★★★ (5 out of 5) Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing Brookstone.
You Know Nothing of My Work!
Douglas Coupland’s new biography of Marshall McLuhan bends the rules of the medium—but what, exactly, is the message?
A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #33: Collapse of the Metrodome
I should have known, when the New York Knicks began winning in November, that some sort of rift was opening up in the firewall that keeps our dreams separate from…
Readers Report Back From… Family/Holidays
In the spirit of holiday and family, please enjoy our festive, sad, and maybe even twisted selection of Rumpus readers’ takes on the season. Edited by Susan Clements.
From Exuberant Hanging Gardens
Leslie Williams is a fine poet, skillful and smart. She takes a range of topics I find by themselves repelling or uninteresting (suburban life, nature, flowers, gardening, Thomas Jefferson, the…
Thirty-One John D. MacDonald Titles and Taglines
Nostalgia, we have agreed, is embarrassing. Maybe even reactionary. The notion that some fading aspect of this or that material culture—usurped by the web—is lost, and that that is a…
DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #60: The World Lit By Other People
We don’t reach the mountaintop from the mountaintop. We start at the bottom and climb up. Blood is involved.