Arlington: The Rap
“I’m ducking gunfire daily,Check to see if one got me,But that’s just life in the hood,When I go get my puffed kashi…”(via almost everyone I know in DC). More videos by Remy.Related Posts:250,000 Books...
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Mattaponi Queen
In this prize-winning collection of linked stories, outcasts and fuckups “dodge what dangers they can to survive in the midst of their aching loneliness.”Belle Boggs’s Bakeless Prize-winning Mattaponi...
View ArticleLittle House in the Big Woods
If figurines were awarded for completing twentysomething life-experience clichés, I have been angling for the entire set: the search for myself in central European beer halls; the move west to try...
View Article250,000 Books Head to the Landfill
Book lovers, avert your eyes: the Fairfax County Public Library in Virginia took a quarter million books and threw them in the trash.It’s common for libraries to prune their collections, getting rid of...
View ArticlePhillip P. Puckett: A Rumpus Roundup
Virginia State Senator Phillip P. Puckett, a Democrat, resigned on Monday. His resignation gives Republicans control of the state legislature.Puckett had planned on taking a new job as deputy of the...
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The Rumpus Interview with Darcey Steinke
Over five novels and a highly acclaimed memoir, Darcey Steinke has made an art of considering the truths to be found in spiritual rootlessness. In her new novel Sister Golden Hair, the narrator is a...
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Visible: Women Writers of Color #1: Desiree Cooper
“The invisibility of writers of color is in fact a willed blindness. But we exist.”With these words, three Los Angeles–based publishers launched #LitinColor to draw attention to overlooked voices. And...
View ArticleA Ringing in Your Ears That Would Disappear by Morning
Growing up in Virginia, in a mixed family in the ’80s and ’90s, was like sticking your heart in a meat grinder daily. You learned to wait for the inevitable Insert Racist Joke Here, followed by the...
View ArticleThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Chicago bookstores are worried about the arrival of a physical Amazon store.One bookstore is using clickbait tactics on social media to trick people into reading more books.Some people actually like...
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Wanted/Needed/Loved #12: Thao Nguyen’s Release
The thing I want to talk about is something I’m not in possession of anymore, but of all the things I’ve lost it’s the thing I think about the most. It’s a patch that had my dad’s name on it from his...
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The Rumpus Interview with Lee Clay Johnson
Nitro Mountain is a stunner of a book, one that remained with me long after I finished the last page. Johnson is a master of creating characters you’re immediately invested in, bringing them to life...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: The Front Bottoms’ The Front Bottoms
The summer of 2012 was my worst summer.Let me preface that by saying that the details aren’t very mind-blowing. Nothing impressively terrible occurred. But the only way I could feel somewhat okay was...
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Otter
“I dreamed in a dream of a city where all the men were like brothers” –Walt Whitman, “Live Oak, with Moss” I was hella lonely, as they would say there, in my Bay Area neighborhood of baby strollers...
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
In Chicago, Aimee Levitt wonders how many bookstores she can visit in a single day to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day. Meanwhile, in Seattle, Moira Macdonald explains how she planned on maximizing...
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
The world’s oldest LGBTQ bookstore has opened a glory-hole inspired gallery display. Like any business, bookstores are influencing customers’ choices, and so what is literary is dictated, at least in...
View ArticleDispatches from the Swamp: The Babble in the Bubble
Washington, DC is a bubble. All capitol cities are. DC even looks like a bubble, ringed as it is by the Beltway (the 64-mile long asphalt ring of I-495). Yet the phrase “inside the beltway” is most...
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Sound & Vision: Michael Hearst
Michael Hearst is a founding member of One Ring Zero, a unique band that uses the theremin, accordion, Claviola, and other unusual instruments and sounds to create music that’s all their own. On the...
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These Places Surround Me: Talking with Quintan Ana Wikswo
Quintan Ana Wikswo is the author of a story collection, The Hope of Floating Has Carried Us This Far, and a novel, A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be, which traces the trajectories of an...
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Salt of the Earth: A Conversation with John Lingan
Patsy Cline, the legendary country singer, haunts John Lingan’s new book, Homeplace: A Southern Town, a Country Legend, and the Last Days of a Mountaintop Honky-Tonk. The arc of the narrative follows...
View ArticleA Sense of God: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore
She Would Be King, Wayétu Moore’s debut novel published by Graywolf Press, tells the stories of three main characters: Gbessa, a wild and passionate suspected witch; Norman Aragon, a loner descended...
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