California
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La Boheme Portlandia
As for gentrification, like in every desirable part of the country, economics decide the contest, and wealth wins every time.
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Pristine California
Seen from the vantage point of this blank grave, and the ruin that came before it, Watkins’ life feels like something out of Dreiser. Seen from its beginning—the summers in Oneonta, the trip West with his best friend—it reads like…
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Housesitting
When you arrived, you reached under the mat to pick up the keys in an envelope. Inside, a note on the kitchen counter said help yourself to anything in the pantry or fridge.
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The Rumpus Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh discusses her first full-length novel, Eileen, betrayal, self-aware narrators, and the catalytic properties of friendship.
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Armored in Cars and Driving Unseen
America is a beautiful country and it was beautiful before we got here. I’m not sure yet if we, the ancestral echo of colonizers, are a beautiful people. I often have doubts.
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Aspects of Travel
I refuse to be resolvable. I wait. I wait for confusion to become a resting place for resolution to become a moving organism, an evolution foretold by my body.
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Books on Television
Television is a great way to sell books. Oprah’s Book Club is the best known example, but Edan Lepucki‘s bestselling debut California certainly owed some of its success to the Colbert Bump. But The Colbert Report has ended, and Jon…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: We, the Crazy Ones
My childhood battle was already set in motion: to resist the vortex. To not go where he was trapped. To not trade his love for my life.
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The Saturday Rumpus Review of Wild
In simplicity there is truth, and being out in wide open spaces often has a way, like high-speed rail, to bring us back to simple things.
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Popularity Contest
Traditionally, the Unlikeable Character in fiction is created with authorial intention. You, as the reader, recognize the cues that the person you’re reading about is alienating or reprehensible, and it’s clear that such characterization is part of author’s aesthetic project……
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Native Transplant
Rumpus contributor J. Ryan Stradal edited the recently published California Prose Directory: New Writing from the Gold State, Number 2. The anthology’s goal? To find the best new practitioners of Californian prose. Down at LARB, Dinah Lenney quizzes Stradal on just how…
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California by Edan Lepucki
Liz Wyckoff reviews CALIFORNIA by Edan Lepucki today in The Rumpus Books.