The Aesthetics of Safety
I find beauty in being protected from danger.
...more
Posts Tagged: reality tv
The Resumes of Identity We Present to Strangers: A Conversation with Dolly Alderton
Dolly Alderton discusses her new novel, GHOSTS.
...more
Rumpus Exclusive: “Chop Money”
Mal’ Atta attacked with a slew of sensory assaults.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #151: David Shields
“Antidote to Trump? Whole book is an attempt to find one.”
...more
You Can Never Escape the Jersey Shore
To watch Jersey Shore is to watch my fantasy, only it’s an imperfect recreation.
...more
Discomfort, Desire, and Drugs: Talking with Ben Gwin
Ben Gwin discusses his debut novel, Clean Time: The True Story of Ronald Regan Middleton, the book’s unique structure, and writing satire.
...more
We Have to Trust Our Punch: A Conversation with Kevin Young
Kevin Young discusses Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, America’s relationship to hoaxes, and what we can learn from that relationship.
...more
I Am Here to Make Friends
I’m not here to wallow in what feels like our new dystopia, no. Me? I am here, to rest up before the next bout. I am here to watch The Price Is Right and make friends.
...more
You Are Nowhere
Didn’t he see what I saw: how a person could survive the unthinkable and still be broken by something as soft and uncertain as loneliness?
...more
Literature’s Second-Class Citizens
They’re there but not there. They’re included but their stories don’t fully weave into the story.
...more
Podcatcher #2: Rose Buddies
Rachel and Griffin McElroy, hosts of The Bachelor fancast Rose Buddies, talk about about the problematic aspects of the show, how they stay hydrated, and what’s up with all those McElroy podcasts.
...more
Born This Way and the Children Who Never Fully Leave Home
Nobody talked to me about what happened when my sister grew up until I was headed off to college.
...moreA Rhetorical Tragedy
We enjoy tragedy because through it, we are able to purge those aspects of ourselves with which we are most uncomfortable. Our onstage avatar embodies all those thoughts and feelings, desires and fears, ambitions and delusions with which we are most unfortunately cursed. And when fate (or the playwright) punishes her for them, we are […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Valuation Methods
In some of my fantasies, I make a pitch for art or for truth, defend them like commodities.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: All Bodies Count
Personal representation weighs heavily on the disabled because we don’t often see each other out in the world.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Alex Dimitrov and Kate Durbin
Alex Dimitrov and Kate Durbin interview each other about place and poetics and poetry in performance, as well as poetry in LA and New York, and using culture as a prop.
...moreIs the Essay like Reality TV?
In an article about the contemporary form of the essay, Adam Kirsch states, “The new essay is exclusively about the self with the world serving only as a foil and an accessory.” This article compares essayists such as Rothbart and Crosley and Sedaris, to the prose equivalent of reality TV. In the essay, they claim to […]
...moreFictional Characters Are Not Your Friends
Critics who fault a character’s unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability. In a cheekily titled BuzzFeed Books essay, “Not Here to Make Friends,” our essays editor Roxane Gay talks about the knotty issue of […]
...morePortrait of an artist in 7 minutes
Rumpus artist MariNaomi has her first published essay over at The Weeklings. She writes an about an honest, raw experience about what creative people will go through for the sake of “exposure”: “The gig was unpaid, but I was promised national exposure. Like any person who makes a living off their art, “exposure” is kind […]
...more15 Words Officially Banished, Including Tweet, Bromance
Last summer, we had a discussion here at The Rumpus about the worst words ever. Well, it turns out that for the last 35 years, Lake Superior State University has been doing even more: a “List of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.” There seems to be some technophobia […]
...more