The Rumpus Interview with Elliot Ackerman
Elliot Ackerman did not write the book he was supposed to write. As a decorated officer who did five deployments with the United States Marine Corps, a veteran of the Second Battle of Fallujah and a...
View ArticleFinding Kurtz
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is driven by the search and discovery of Kurtz, the man turned mad by Africa. Kurtz is the pale white colonizer who rapes the continent, is also worshiped by the...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Interview with Campbell McGrath
Like many young poets, I came of age reading Campbell McGrath in graduate school. This was always a pleasure, never a chore. Collections like Capitalism, Spring Comes to Chicago, and American Noise...
View ArticleWar Narratives #6: The Rumpus Interview with Phil Klay
In 2014, Phil Klay published Redeployment, his collection of short stories set in and about the war in Iraq. Each of the twelve short stories looks at the war from a different perspective. Together...
View ArticleSwinging Modern Sounds #72: Urban Pastoral
Way Out Weather, Steve Gunn’s release from late 2014, has been one of my most consistently favorite albums of the last couple of years. (And maybe it’s exactly a writer’s album, because it was...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Interview with Annie DeWitt
Few writers can assemble a sentence with the elegance of Annie DeWitt, whose work I first fell for in the pages of NOON a couple of years ago. To be more accurate, my admiration arrived in the ear, as...
View ArticleLiterature’s Second-Class Citizens
All my life, I have tried to keep quiet. As an Asian-American who grew up in the 1980s in places where whites were the majority, I wanted to assimilate. I didn’t want to be that minority, you know, the...
View ArticleEvery Woman Is a Nation unto Herself: A Conversation with Sabina Murray
Sabina Murray lives and writes with a brio you might associate with another era: one in which elections alone do not shake some segment of the populace into an awareness of moral issues and gallows...
View ArticleLess Brilliant but More Profound: Denis Johnson’s The Largesse of the Sea Maiden
Before he died in May of last year, Denis Johnson published ten novels, five books of poetry, five stage plays and screenplays, much reportage, and a single collection of short fiction—a psychedelic...
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