Saturday Rumpus Interview: Tirza True Latimer
There is not a lot of reinforcement for being a whole person in capitalism, let alone in the universities.
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Saturday Rumpus Essay: Black Barbie
She reached out for my hand from behind the boxed area of the courtroom that separated the inmates, like her, from the lawyers like me. Me and the bailiffs and the good citizens just there on parking tickets. “Can I hold your hand?” she said.
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Literary Puns
Timothy Leo Taranto illustrates some of literature’s greats, including David Foster Wallace and Gromit, Flan-nery O’Connor, and John Frankensteinbeck.
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Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
These poems are not traps, but safe spaces with doors inside them.
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Shit Turd and The Purple Light
With this much self-awareness and meditation, residents such as myself tend to forget – or, rather, concentrate on forgetting – that Encinitas is also a half-marathon’s distance from the Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, which is roughly the size of Rhode Island
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OG DAD #15: TOT BITES DOG
So I’m standing in front of the fridge, door open, wondering more-or-less what happened to my life, when I suddenly remember I have an eight month old baby in my arms.
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The Rumpus Book Club Conversation with Manuel Gonzales
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Manuel Gonzales about The Miniature Wife, subverting genre, building a believable fictional world, and the invention of paper towels.
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Guns in the Family
In my extended family, a generation ago, it was the odd household that didn’t have guns. I think that for my father’s father, a gun served mainly as another mechanical thing to tinker with.
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Tramp
On what would turn out to be the eve of the death of the recent gang rape victim in Delhi, my family and I gathered together to watch a Hindi film that my parents had ordered on Netflix. The 1951 movie, Awaara, which translates to “tramp” in English
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SPOTLIGHT: The Illustrated Press: Chicago
The Illustrated Press: Chicago is a guide to a changing, vibrant city, captured through the writing of Darryl Holliday and the illustrations of Erik Nelson Rodriguez. In stories about subjects minor and major, the authors provide a sense of Chicago and its people.
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The Rumpus Interview with Halimah Marcus and Benjamin Samuel
Halimah Marcus and Benjamin Samuel, the co-editors of Recommended Reading, discuss the ins and outs of editing an ambitious literary project.
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Last Book I Loved + Tumblr Storyboard
We’re thrilled to announce our new partnership with Tumblr Storyboard!
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Indian River
In Florida there is an Indian River that flows through a swamp in the northern half of the state. It behaves nothing like a river at all—instead it commingles with the land to make a land-water hybrid, which is what much of Florida feels like anyway.
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Ted Wilson Reviews the World #167
MY MICROWAVE
★★★★★ (3 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing my microwave.
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Django Take #1: Good is the Enemy of Great
Look, we’re going to have to make a decision about Quentin Tarantino.
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Django Take #2: We Have Arrived
L.S.B. That’s what my crew called themselves. Light Skinned Bitches. I refused to say it. The light-skinned part.
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Django Take #3: (Re)chained
Villains
Django is not a movie with “villains.” Instead, the movie itself is villainous.
Django Take #4: Substance Amidst Spectacle
There is an unpleasant moment about halfway through Quentin Tarantino’s new film, Django Unchained.
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Django Take #5: Paving the Road to Hell
The problem with Tarantino’s Django Unchained is that it’s a very good movie. Wildly entertaining, expertly made, and very fun to watch. I loved almost every second of the watching of it.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #39: Interview Within an Interview
In this piece, we are not at any time meant to use the word greatness to refer to a band from Boston, Big Dipper, best known during the late eighties
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Sunday Rumpus Fiction: My Parasite
First, they did things the usual way. Rita and Lila met other conjoined twins at the conventions and dated them rigorously…
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Saturday Rumpus Interview: Dana Johnson
It’s true that sometimes you can learn more about people from reading their fiction than their non-fiction.
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Saturday Rumpus Essay: Baptismal Walk
Not long ago, I was fortunate to take a two-day class with Philippe Petit, the virtuoso wirewalker who famously rigged a wire illegally between the roofs of the World Trade Center towers
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ALBUMS OF OUR LIVES: NEKO CASE’S MIDDLE CYCLONE
The year 2008 tumbled out of itself and took with it the things that consumed my days. Within a month I had lost my job to the upholding of liquor laws, my college education to an unavoidable graduation, and my girlfriend to youth and general apathy.
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Readers Report Back From… Storm Stories
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Storm Stories.”
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Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me #14: Marco Roth
Sometimes I fantasize about expanding these conversations beyond the one-on-one
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The Problem with the Problem with Memoir
I got an email from a friend yesterday asking me if I’d seen this article on Gawker, Journalism Is Not Narcissism, by Hamilton Nolan. I hadn’t but I was aware of the argument. It’s an easy one to make, that memoir and personal essay are killing journalism.
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