Rumpus Original
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Tissue of Flesh and Light
Marchant transforms potentially stale-sounding specifics into a breathing, universally grasped object as writer, reader and paradoxically, the “no longer beautiful mind” are in communion, even if the mind presented cannot comprehend the connection.
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The Inevitability of Fashion
As a society, there are specific fashion trends we all look back on and can pretty much agree were horrible mistakes.
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A Survey of the Stripper Memoir
Early on in her stripper memoir Diablo Cody declares “strippers are the most fascinating, inscrutable animals I’d ever observed.” If the number of stripper memoirs that have appeared in the past few years are anything to go by, publishers agree.…
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Love Is a Plane Crash of the Soul
Two Latin American novels, published in English for the first time, stake out radically different artistic territory.
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“Crowdfunding” and “Friendraising” a Shorty Q & A with Deanna Zandt
Deanna Zandt is writing a book. She has a contract with Berrett-Koehler, but the publishing house does not usually “give advances, relying instead on a more author-friendly royalty structure.”
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Doug Fogelson
I keep the first picture in mind, but I frame each new picture as if it’s its own composition, bearing in mind that it is related to what came before it and what’s coming after it.
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Life Is Beautiful
Vicki Forman’s Bakeless Prize-winning memoir recounts the premature births, and deaths, of her children.
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An Imperfect Masterpiece: The Rumpus Interview with Members of Midwest Dilemma
Midwest Dilemma’s Timelines and Tragedies combines resonant storytelling with genre-bending indie-folk music and a plethora of eclectic instruments.
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Mike Tyson in Five Acts: A Rumpus Consideration
I Mike Tyson doesn’t seem full of it, but sometimes it seems full of him. Each persona gets taken to an extreme. Think Gollum in Lord of the Rings, if he moved up a few weight-classes; or Hamlet on protein…
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert Sullivan
Journalist Robert Sullivan often documents unlovely corners of the natural world: The Meadowlands (1998) turned a naturalist’s eye on a dispiriting region of northern New Jersey notable for its Mafia dumping grounds, while in Rats (2004) Sullivan gave Ratus norvegicus…
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Jessica Anthony
Jessica Anthony’s first novel, The Convalescent (McSweeney’s Books) is the first recipient of McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. It’s about a really short guy who sells meat out of a bus in Northern Virginia and is in love with…
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A FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #11: The Auxiliary Father
My high school soccer coach was a Guatemalan immigrant who had made his way to the States when he was in his twenties. At first he’d earned his living as an Arthur Murray dance instructor, but that phase of his…