The Latest from Oslo
The death toll as of this writing is 91. According to The Guardian’s live coverage, “Norwegian foreign minister Jonas Gahr Støre has said some of those killed on Utøya probably died from drowning as...
View ArticleChuck Palahniuk’s “victims of his gore-filled prose”
On June 11, Chuck Palahniuk, author of Fight Club and Choke, published Invisible Monsters Remix, a director’s cut of the novel in which “the reader is made to jump back and forth to different chapters...
View ArticleAurora Shooting Roundup
Our thoughts are with the victims of today’s tragedy: 12 people were killed and 59 wounded by gunman at a movie theater outside of Denver, Colorado early this morning during the release of The Dark...
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Explicit Violence
In a bar, with friends, listening to a man I’ve admired for years saying this: “Enough with the sob stories, ladies. We get it. If I hear one more story about some fucked up sad violent shit that...
View ArticleThanks, Feministing!
Feministing gives big love to this week’s must-read essay by Lidia Yuknavitch, “Explicit Violence.”We love you back!Related Posts:Explicit ViolenceGo Ahead, Feed the TrollsThe Next Letter in the Mail:...
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The Illusion of Safety/The Safety of Illusion
When I see men who look like him or his friends. When I smell beer on a man’s breath. When I smell Polo cologne. When I hear a harsh laugh. When I walk by a group of men, clustered together, and...
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Placenta Previa
The problem so many people, including myself, have with roses is that there is nothing left to say about them. I understand adherence to social sanctions. Card-, flower-, and candy-giving offer refuge...
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Brother, This is Your Memory Cloak
These are the things that you chose to forget about your childhood. These are the memories that became carbon deposits within the soft interior of your hippocampus.In a poignantly regretful tone, you...
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Columbine, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood, Tucson, Aurora, Newtown: An Etiology
Perry Miller: “There is nothing so idle as to praise the Puritans for being in any sense conscious or deliberate pioneers of religious liberty—unless, indeed, it is still more idle to berate them...
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In the Ezo: Behind Closed Doors in Tbilisi
Things move quickly in Tbilisi, when they move at all. The haggling takes ten minutes—the rent holds steady, but Dato will replace the washing machine and install wireless internet throughout the...
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Detroit: America’s Ciudad Juárez
Even before there was a war in Ciudad Juárez, I remember that Juárez, like much of the border during my childhood in the’90s, had the feel of a war zone—sublime, heavy, preternaturally charged in its...
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Tim Parrish
I can’t remember what I was doing the first time I heard Tim Parrish’s name, but I know who said it. Audrey Petty. As Creative Nonfiction Editor of Ninth Letter, she had accepted an essay of his,...
View ArticleWeekly Geekery
Do video games undermine empathy? Or are they just a comfortable scapegoat for a violent culture?Scientists search for an evolutionary reason for art. Spoiler alert: The answer is men and sex.How does...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Steve Almond
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Steve Almond about his new book, Against Football, One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto, the complicity of fans in the violence of the NFL, the sports media’s role in the...
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The Rumpus Interview with Susan Minot
Susan Minot’s first book, Monkeys, was published in 1986, and she produced another book every three to five years like clockwork. That is, until, the dozen-year gap between her last one, Rapture and...
View ArticleThe Saturday Rumpus Essay: Falling For The Femme Fatale
Before I was a goth, I was a nerd.I imagine this is a dual transition a lot of young men went through before “geek” was “chic”: when you don’t have particularly good social skills, junior high and high...
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The Saturday Rumpus Review of Under The Skin
Scarlett Johansson roams Scotland as an alien in human form in British director Jonathan Glazer’s 2014 film, Under the Skin, a loose adaptation of Michel Faber’s 2000 book by the same name. Her unnamed...
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The Rumpus Interview with Susanne Paola Antonetta
It’s embarrassing to admit that when I arrived at Western Washington University’s Master of Arts in English program in the fall of 2001, I could count on two hands—and two hands only—the number of...
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The Rumpus Interview with Mark Danielewski
At the beginning of the new millennium, I was writing content for a dodgy print-on-demand publisher in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley. In the first week of January, I received a call from Sophie Cottrell,...
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Kickback
“Stay still and don’t make a sound and I won’t have to use my knife.”The blue vinyl beneath me is slick with my sweat but I don’t notice. Instead, I focus on inhaling and exhaling. The overalled man on...
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