A Year In Rumpus Book Reviews 2020
A look back at the books we reviewed in 2020!
...more
Posts Tagged: Mark O’Connell
The Privilege of Anxiety: Mark O’Connell’s Notes from an Apocalypse
What does our “future-dread,” as O’Connell puts it, show us about our own lives in the present?
...more
Notable Online: 4/19–4/25
Literary events taking place virtually this week!
...more
Notable Los Angeles: 10/7–10/13
Literary events in and around L.A. this week!
...moreThinking About Tweeting About Working on My Novel
Artist Cory Arcangel recently curated a collection of tweets containing the phrase “working on my novel” to produce a book of the same name. The New Yorker’s Mark O’Connell wonders why—why he did it, why they tweeted it, and why it matters to us: …it’s hard to imagine a book providing a more solid pretext […]
...moreOne Hundred Years of Dublin
Gather round, ye James Joyce devotees: Mark O’Connell has an essay (replete with some pretty nifty info-graphics) up at Salon on the Dublin of the past and present: Everyone in Dubliners is thinking about a way out, if not actively pursuing one; everyone is dreaming of some better version of himself in some better place. The stories are filled with vague conjurings of […]
...moreYou Are Invisible
Writing in the New Yorker about the smartphone app Cloak, Mark O’Connell offers a thoroughly beautiful and poetic commentary on the ontology of visibility: By generating a kind of omnipresence—whereby we are always available, visible, contactable, all of us there all the time—the technologies that mediate our lives also cause us to disappear, to vanish into a fixed position on […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Mark O’Connell
Mark O’Connell, author of the first original e-book from The Millions, talks about why he is interested in and troubled by what he calls this “frictionless sharing and flattening of affect,” particularly when it comes to what Internet inside jokes have nicknamed Epic Fails.
...moreWhen Fiction becomes Life
Mark O’Connell tells a fascinating story in The Millions about his encounter with a recently released murderer, Malcolm MacArthur. O’Connell grew up hearing and reading stories about MacArthur murders, but his favorite is a fictional novel, The Book of Evidence, whose main character, Freddie Montgomery, is based on MacArthur. For O’Connell, what was so strange about seeing […]
...more