Whitman
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #25: Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been, a Success?
In America, everybody, it seems, wants to be a success. Me, too. Recently, I confided to a family member that sometimes, in moments of deep despair (fortunately they are fairly uncommon), I find myself contemplating suicide as the most sensible…
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Corinne Lee and Finding an Antidote to America’s Toxicity
Poet Corinne Lee on writing her epic book-length poem Plenty and finding new ways to live in a rapidly changing world.
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Otter
The emblem, not the animal, mattered. We swatted mosquitoes, made no pilgrimages to Vermont to see bears and moose. I wanted to get as close as possible to my potential animal totem.
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The Rumpus Interview with Micah Perks
Micah Perks talks about her new novel, What Becomes Us, America’s cultural and mythical heritage, and why every novel is a political novel.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: April, 1968
Used to see lots of psychedelic princes and princesses on Haight Street. Not many these days. But here were hundreds of the turned on and tuned in, dressed like birds and peacocks in heat.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #54: Jade Chang on The Wangs vs. the World
With a mix of humor, agility, and insight, Jade Chang’s debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World (HMH Books, October 2016), tells a fresh immigrant story. Charles Wang has left his native homeland to become a successful businessman in America.…
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Pernicious Individualism
If anything, Emerson’s transparent eyeball is now a webcam hacked by the NSA. Over at Lit Hub, Jonathon Sturgeon writes about the supposedly rampant and undying force of individualism in American writing—the “imperial self,” an all-encompassing and socially blind thing—from Emerson…
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A Mélange of Loafing and Looking
In Leslie Jamison’s introduction to a new edition of Walt Whitman’s Specimen Days & Collect, excerpted over at Slate, the word “specimen” is rescued from its isolating, clinical connotations, instead becoming realigned with Whitman’s vision of abundance and celebration. Jamison recounts…
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Dean Young’s The Art of Recklessness: A Review?
“The emphasis on craft, on procedures and techniques, is like the creation of perfectly safe nuclear reactors without acknowledging the necessity of radioactive matter for the core.”