New York Times
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It’s All Context
The Internet offers us near-limitless amounts of information, often for free, at the touch of our fingertips. But it’s also a tool, and like all tools, is subject to the ways in which it is (or isn’t) put to use. Rumpus…
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The Alt Weekly is Dead, Long Live the Alt Weekly
How valuable are print alt weeklies? Very, Baltimore City Paper senior editor Baynard Woods argues in the New York Times. Woods writes that alt weeklies are “connected to a city in the way that a website can never be” and that they “report on…
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My Internet Girlfriend or My Girlfriend, the Internet?
In the New York Times novelist Charles Yu, author of the hilarious, tragic, brain-melting How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, recounts his experience falling in love with technology. A private channel had opened up, a vast network…
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Austin’s Lit Scene Heats Up
We’ve written before about the blossoming Austin publishing scene, particularly the small press A Strange Object and their first title, Three Scenarios in which Hana Sasaki Grows a Tail by Kelly Luce. Now the New York Times is taking notice, too (about…
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Mr. Bad News Who?
It can be a harrowing experience, Whitman knows, requiring that the writer become an instant historian, assessing in a few hours the dead man’s life with lucidity, accuracy, and objectivity. Gay Talese believes “Mr. Bad News” is one of the…
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Do Likable Characters Equal Likable Stories?
I wonder if that is the case for many of us. Perhaps, in the widespread longing for likable characters, there is this: a desire, through fiction, for contact with what we’ve armored ourselves against in the rest of our lives,…
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“I Might Really Geek Out Here, Dude”
In 2005, Elizabeth Gilbert was a mid-list author with some fiction and some journalism under her belt. In 2006, she tried something new and published a memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. The rest is history and Oprah Book Club sales. Now she’s returned…
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RIP Elmore Leonard
Masterful crime novelist Elmore Leonard has passed away at age 87 after a stroke. Leonard published 45 novels during his prolific career, including several that were adapted into movies and TV shows, such as Get Shorty, 3:10 to Yuma, and Rum Punch…
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Genre on the Mind
Is the wiring of our brains related to how we write as individuals? Joyce Dyer thinks so. One student in the summer group said she could retain nothing of the substance of her dreams, but only their sensations. What a…
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Celebrating the Essay
The topic of essayism—one especially relevant to the Rumpus—is granted the meticulous attention it deserves in this opinion piece Christy Wampole wrote for the New York Times. Wampole artfully weaves the essay’s deep history through a narrative about the development…
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Jonathan Safran Foer on the Sociopsychological Effects of Technology
In an opinion piece for the New York Times, Jonathan Safran Foer (award-winning author of Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) contemplates the implications of living in a society full of “iDistractions,” arguing that the increased daily use…
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Talk About “By the Numbers”
Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who…