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The Rumpus

therumpus.net

Literary essays, advice columns, and conversations. Personal-essay heavy; sometimes uneven, often unexpectedly good.

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The Rumpus

Unpublished foreword to William Wantling’s 7 on Style [circa 1974] - The Rumpus

His writing didn’t contain the trickery and the sheen that the larger American poetry audience demands—and things never became easy for him, that’s why he

Charles BukowskiJun 11, 200910 min read
The Rumpus

Down in the Dumpster - The Rumpus

"What Joshua Mohr is doing has more in common with Kafka, Lewis Carroll, and Haruki Murakami, all great chroniclers of the fantastic. He’s interested in

Joshua FurstJun 6, 20095 min read
The Rumpus

How to Tell a True Story - The Rumpus

Ten years after, I sit in a psychiatrist’s office on the Upper East Side. This is my second time here. The first time, when I first met Dr. J, he asked me

Jun 14, 201225 min read
The Rumpus

Rumpus Sound Takes: Phases and Stages - The Rumpus

Plants and Animals The End of That (Secret City) Rock bands age reluctantly, if at all. But the years of practicing, playing, touring, partying and

Eric SwedlundJul 3, 20124 min read
The Rumpus

Saturday History Lesson: The Unrequited Yeats - The Rumpus

Certain writers cast shadows of incredible length and darkness, and Yeats is one of them. His poetry has a way of crowding out the sun. As a teenager I

Michelle DeanMay 19, 20128 min read
The Rumpus

Get Me Away From Here, I'm Dying - The Rumpus

No one comes in to check on me, no one asks if I’m okay after I finally emerge, embarrassed, my eyes completely red. They all love me, but not enough to forgive what I’m about to do.

Gayle BrandeisMay 23, 201220 min read
The Rumpus

Bodies in Bikinis: Are You Buying It? - The Rumpus

As we watched the stick, scantily clad models parade onscreen for public consumption, my daughter turned to me, her face tight with disgust, and asked, “Why would women do that?”

Ethel RohanJun 7, 201224 min read
The Rumpus

Between the Crackups, by Rebecca Lehmann - The Rumpus

Rebecca Lehmann’s collection, Between the Crackups, is a glittering, furious book. Many of its poems inhabit a childhood world full of violence and anger.

Melissa GinsburgMay 11, 20126 min read
The Rumpus

Girls Girls Girls - The Rumpus

A television show about my twenties would follow the life of a girl who is lost, literally and figuratively. There wouldn’t be a laugh track.

Roxane GayMay 3, 201226 min read
The Rumpus

Forever Changeless: The Beach Boys, The Smile Sessions - The Rumpus

In June of 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out. Brian Wilson is said to have heard it and wept. Wilson, the Beach Boys’ main songwriter,

Chris DavidsonApr 30, 20129 min read
The Rumpus

The Winner Returns - The Rumpus

A 1972 novel recently re-released, Rosalyn Drexler's To Smithereens plays with fact and imagination, memoir and fiction, in ways seldom seen in her own

Ben PfeifferOct 31, 20114 min read
The Rumpus

The Rumpus Interview with Laura Miller - The Rumpus

In 1995, a small group of writers and editors met to plan Salon. Laura Miller, who became employee number 5, was involved in creating the prototype. This

Gabrielle GantzOct 26, 201111 min read
The Rumpus

Benjamin Nadler: The Last Book I Loved, The Street - The Rumpus

I return to The Street again and again. I first read the novel when I working as a bookseller out on West 4th St. in New York. A man I sold books with

Benjamin NadlerOct 24, 20116 min read
The Rumpus

DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #88: The Human Scale - The Rumpus

What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you?

SugarOct 21, 201163 min read
The Rumpus

The Rumpus Interview With Will Potter - The Rumpus

In 2007, I was put on Homeland Security’s Watch List. True, my brother had just been arrested. He had been a member of the underground Animal Liberation

Caroline PaulOct 24, 201112 min read
The Rumpus

Magazine Review #8: Boat Magazine, Issue 1 - The Rumpus

Boat Studio, a small creative firm based in London, packed up their office and moved to Sarajevo for a month to make a magazine. The idea: to get people

Nancy SmithOct 18, 20115 min read
The Rumpus

Why not read Moby-Dick? - The Rumpus

Historian Nathaniel Philbrick lays out a convincing, if scholarly, case for why Moby-Dick is relevant to modern audiences. Nathaniel Philbrick opens this

Lisa LevyOct 20, 20115 min read
The Rumpus

Census, 1980 - The Rumpus

An excerpt from Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner, our November Rumpus Book Club selection (which is already receiving wonderful reviews, so now's a

Peter OrnerOct 20, 20119 min read
The Rumpus

What Began As a Love Letter… - The Rumpus

Warmed and Bound, an anthology of neo-noir fiction, offers 38 dark and beautiful stories from Matt Bell, Blake Butler, and others. Warmed and Bound is an

Antonia CraneOct 24, 20117 min read
The Rumpus

Occupy Des Moines - The Rumpus

Today, there were protests going on in Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Paris, Barcelona, San Francisco--most major cities around the globe--all inspired by

Amy Letter and Brian SpearsOct 15, 20116 min read
The Rumpus

The Rumpus Review of Drive - The Rumpus

There are two ways of looking at Drive, the recent Ryan Gosling noir. You can consider what happens on the screen—the plot, dialogue, and action, or you

Larry FaheyOct 18, 201116 min read
The Rumpus

The Allure of Arithmetic: Rumpus Review of Moneyball - The Rumpus

Ever since its invention in the mid-19th century, people have seen baseball as a metaphor for American life. Writers and filmmakers from John Updike to

Peter SaalfieldOct 14, 20114 min read
The Rumpus

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Meghan O'Rourke - The Rumpus

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Meghan O'Rourke about her poetry collection Once. This is an edited transcript of the Poetry Book Club discussion

The Rumpus Book ClubOct 10, 201120 min read
The Rumpus

A Life Defined By Circumstance: Maryam Keshavarz Explores Freedom In Tehran - The Rumpus

In 1982, my parents packed a suitcase and paid a smuggler to help them escape from Tehran, Iran. The reason? Me. It wasn’t the political revolution itself

Melody GodfredOct 13, 20116 min read
The Rumpus

A Visible Man In An Invisible World - The Rumpus

Cognitive dissonance abounds in Chuck Klosterman’s second novel, The Visible Man, which ostensibly is about a guy who uses his ability to become virtually

Aimee DeLongOct 11, 20117 min read
The Rumpus

The Rumpus Interview with Elissa Schappell - The Rumpus

Elissa Schappell and I met too many years ago to say, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. We were both waiters, which means that you serve students,

Jennifer GilmoreOct 10, 201110 min read
The Rumpus

The Occupy Wall Street Library - The Rumpus

A prerequisite for any successful revolution is literature. As the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown, its headquarters, Zuccoti Park, has spawned many

Matthew WolfeOct 8, 20116 min read
The Rumpus

Missing Tiles in the American Mosaic: The Rumpus Interview with Alia Malek - The Rumpus

In late October 2000, Alia Malek, the American daughter of Syrian immigrant parents, started work as a civil rights lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department.

Sean CarmanOct 11, 201114 min read
The Rumpus

Donnie Darko and the Tyranny of the Franks - The Rumpus

Perhaps the most enduring movies are those that tempt us into deep interpretation even as they resist all efforts to impose meaning on them. Alfred

Nicholas RombesOct 5, 20118 min read
The Rumpus

I'm Nothing If Not Polite - The Rumpus

Notes From Irrelevance is a long weave of sentence shimmers with influences of someone who has read and absorbed a rich range, from classics to the most

Barbara BermanOct 5, 20115 min read