Inauguration Day Root Canal
On Inauguration Day, I can’t feel my mouth.
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Posts Tagged: Minnesota
Notable Twin Cities: 7/22–7/28
Literary events in and around the Twin Cities this week!
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You Can Never Escape the Jersey Shore
To watch Jersey Shore is to watch my fantasy, only it’s an imperfect recreation.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #115: Bao Phi
“Nothing is ever one thing.”
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Titanic Turns Twenty in a World That Won’t Talk About It
After twenty years and eleven Oscars and eleventy billion dollars, we still don’t really talk about Titanic.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
...moreNotable Twin Cities: 6/25–7/1
Sunday 6/25: Join the fun: it’s the first day of the week-long International Fitzgerald Conference! It’ll include a host of papers and presentations, as well as a celebration of the Minnesota roots of Fitzgerald’s writing. 6/25-7/1, Hotel 340, 12 p.m., $205. Tuesday 6/27: Celebrate Pride with the June installment of Intermedia Arts’ Queer Voices reading series! This edition of Queer Voices reading will also […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 2
There isn’t even a discussion. There aren’t any words. You just start swinging—the building is a fence, your cousins are a fence. The two of you are surrounded. There’s no escape for either of you.
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Sound & Vision: Arthur Fournier
Allyson McCabe talks with Arthur Fournier, an independent dealer of books, serials, manuscripts, and archives, about how he developed his niche, and how digital access has both enriched and complicated the work of archiving and collecting.
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Voices on Addiction: The Only Thing That Has to Change Is Everything
The word rehab is short for rehabilitate, which means to restore to a former capacity. Like houses, I remember thinking. Demo the kitchen. Tear down the walls.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Just announced today: beloved Brooklyn bookstore BookCourt is closing after 35 years in business. Independent booksellers were the focus of a panel at the Miami Book Fair—discussion focused on how big business was surprised that small business strategies could be useful in selling books. Kyoto, Japan is home to a bookstore hostel with eighteen bunks built into […]
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The Lonely Voice #27: William Trevor, What Haunts Us Is Us
And this is the majesty of William Trevor. He creates—and at the same time affirms—the dark we’ve all got inside us. He gives our nightmares flesh.
...moreDear President-elect Trump
This evening, after returning home from my job as an English instructor in St. Paul, Minnesota, I locked my keys in my car. I believe the reason for this mistake pertained to my haggard and undone emotions. From my vantage point, your campaign included numerous emotional-appeal techniques. Over the last year, I’ve heard a lot of […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Inquiring Minds in Saugerties, New York installed a window display with the words “Make America Hate Again,” along with a swastika, to protest Trump. Hilarity Protests ensued. Minnesota has some cozy bookstores. Barnes & Noble wants to build smaller stores with more coffee and alcohol to compete with independent stores that serve as community centers. A London, […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Raeff
Married authors Anne Raeff and Lori Ostlund, both winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, discuss their craft, their process, and the way they negotiate the give and take involved in sharing a vocation.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Connie Wanek
Connie Wanek discusses her latest book, Rival Gardens: New and Selected Poems, the challenge of looking back at older poems, and what prioritizing writing looks like.
...morePhilando Castile: A Rumpus Roundup
On Wednesday evening, police shot and killed St. Paul Minnesota resident Philando Castile after stopping him for a broken tail light. More than five hundred police shootings have occurred so far this year, and Alton Sterling’s Philando Castile’s death might have simply become another statistic on an interactive graphic except for one pesky citizen who […]
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The Rumpus Interview with J. Ryan Stradal
J. Ryan Stradal talks about his debut novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest and why the rise of the American foodie has less to do with hipsters than you might think.
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) What happened when Colorado gave out free birth control: exactly what you’d expect. What happened when a man tied 100 helium balloons to his lawn chair: exactly what you’d expect. People in this quaint town are taking […]
...moreThe Second Saga
The New York Times Magazine has the second part of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s slow American road trip.
...moreEmbarrassing Parents
A mother of a 7th grade student at Northville Mill Middle School in Michigan is protesting the school to send home permission slips before assigning “The Diary of Anne Frank” to its students. The mother called the book “inappropriate material” due to the fact that there is a passage that describes the female body and Frank’s feelings […]
...moreThe Summer Without Men
Siri Hustvedt’s new novel The Summer Without Men traces the summer of Mia Fredrickson, newly divorced and back home in Minnesota surrounded by women, young and old.
...moreTemporary Shelter
Weston Cutter’s debut collection, You’d Be a Stranger, Too, delivers the magical click of excellent fiction.
...moreThe Bigness of the World
There’s a lot to smile at in The Bigness of the World, Lori Ostlund’s Flannery O’Conner Award-winning collection—but there aren’t a lot of jokes. In fact, over the course of a dozen stories, Ostlund presents all kinds of suffering: death, self-mutilation, jail, child abuse, poverty, and an overabundance of breakups. As the title suggests, Bigness […]
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