humor
-
FUNNY WOMEN #146: New Rules for Lifeboat #3
After our discussion of pronoun usage, Keith will be addressed as The Pirate Formerly Known as Keith. (Respect each other’s journeys, please.)
-
Aziz Nesin’s Ghost
This week, the Turkish government has jailed a prominent politician who is referred to fondly as “Kurdish Obama” and shutdown Cumhuriyet, a popular newspaper. Amid these distressing developments, Kaya Genç looks towards books and history in her profile of 20th century…
-
Literature Tricks or Political Threats?
So familiar have the aesthetic conventions of horror become that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish “real” Halloween movies from parodies. Something similar has occurred in our political life. At the New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey shares a brief…
-
Flipping the Gender Script
Tired of the incessant number of novels describing women in terms of their slender bodies, simple minds, or sexual status? Over at McSweeney’s, read this hilarious satire from Meg Ellison where the gender script is flipped, and men are written…
-
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #55: Donald Ray Pollock
Donald Ray Pollock has been steadily serving up plates of mild horror since his first book of short stories, Knockemstiff, appeared in 2008. Pollock followed the explosion of Knockemstiff with The Devil All the Time, in 2011, his first novel,…
-
FUNNY WOMEN #145: The Mother of All Jobs
Why do you think God gave you those narrow hips, if not for wearing blue suit pants?
-
The Rumpus Review of Bridget Jones’s Baby
Perhaps Bridget fans who watched the movies but never read the books might not find this movie to be such a hard blow… But those who read the books—and those who loved the pilgrim soul in Bridget—will feel the loss…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Abigail Ulman
Abigail Ulman talks about her debut collection Hot Little Hands, the limitations of the cultural narrative, her paralyzing pre-publication fears, and why she loves adolescent narrators.
-
John Cheever Could Never Be a Single Mother
John Cheever, known as the “Chekov of the suburbs” for his fiction’s signature focus on the domestic, suburban family life in the 40s and 50s, probably couldn’t hack being a single mom today. At McSweeney’s, Jeanne Darst shares the excerpts from Cheever’s fiction…
-
FUNNY WOMEN #144: Food Reviews by Third Grader
This refined combination will transport taste buds into a state of euphoria matched only when capturing a rare Mewtwo on Pokémon Go.
-
The Rumpus Review of One More Time with Feeling
“We didn’t ask for it,” Cave begins another poetic flight, and again we think he’s talking about something ghastly, “but it’s all around us, a gratuitous beauty.”
-
Love Me Tinder
What she felt: nothing, and as he spoke more nothing perched, nested, laid eggs, and caught the avian flu inside her. Riffing on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, Janelle Blasdel offers a brilliant homage to dating in the…