{"id":1318,"date":"2009-01-21T14:48:50","date_gmt":"2009-01-21T21:48:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/index.php\/2009\/01\/mental_floss-on-rumpus\/"},"modified":"2009-01-21T14:53:00","modified_gmt":"2009-01-21T21:53:00","slug":"mental_floss-on-rumpus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2009\/01\/21\/mental_floss-on-rumpus\/","title":{"rendered":"mental_floss on Rumpus"},"content":{"rendered":"

from mental_floss Blog<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

Raisin\u2019 a Rumpus: an Interview with Stephen Elliott<\/a><\/span>
\nby\u00a0Ransom Riggs<\/a><\/span>\u00a0– January 21, 2009 – 7:21 AM<\/span><\/p>\n

There are many short biographies of writer Stephen Elliot floating around the\u00a0internet<\/a>, but\u00a0this one<\/a>, from the Chicago Tribune, is my favorite:<\/p>\n

\n

Elliott has been a ward of the State of Illinois, a stripper and a law school admissions counselor. Now, he\u2019s becoming a literary success. He is starting to get some serious book buzz and was just named a finalist for the New York Public Library\u2019s Young Lions Fiction Award to be announced this spring. He\u2019s a player in the hipster, cult publishing world of writer Dave Eggers and his McSweeney\u2019s Quarterly, and it was Eggers himself who edited \u201cHappy Baby\u201d (\u201dSurely the most intelligent and beautiful book ever written about juvenile detention centers, sadomasochism and drugs,\u201d said an excerpt from a New York Times review printed on the cover.) In short, in some circles, Elliott\u2019s got \u2014 or is, at least, getting \u2014 rock star status.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Now, after all the excitement that\u2019s been generated about Elliott\u2019s literary career, he\u2019s gone and done something few could have anticipated: started a\u00a0website<\/a>.\u00a0Therumpus.net<\/a>\u00a0isn\u2019t your run-of-the-mill content aggregator\/blog, though: it features original reviews, interviews and essays on art, culture and whatever Elliott finds interesting by writers of literary merit, and blogs by long-established icons like Rick Moody (who wrote\u00a0The Ice Storm<\/em>), Jerry Stahl (Permanent Midnight<\/em>) and others. But enough of my yakkin\u2019 \u2014 I\u2019ll let Stephen Elliott tell you about it himself.<\/p>\n

Ransom<\/strong>: Who is the site for? What\u2019s the angle?<\/p>\n

Stephen Elliott<\/strong>: The site\u2019s for a lot of people. It\u2019s for people who are overeducated and underemployed. People who want to kill time at work and want an intelligent website that\u2019s always being updated (we update fifteen to twenty times a day). A lot of these people are visiting sites like The Huffington Post or The Daily Beast because they don\u2019t know where else to go. They\u2019re reading rants and they\u2019re reading different takes on the same \u201cstory of the day.\u201d A lot of those people would rather read a short interview with somebody interesting or a book review or a really well written short personal essay.<\/p>\n

[ click to continue reading at mental_floss<\/a> ]<\/p>\n

[\u00a0click to dive into The Rumpus<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from mental_floss Blog Raisin\u2019 a Rumpus: an Interview with Stephen Elliott by\u00a0Ransom Riggs\u00a0– January 21, 2009 – 7:21 AM There are many short biographies of writer Stephen Elliot floating around the\u00a0internet, but\u00a0this one, from the Chicago Tribune, is my favorite: Elliott has been a ward of the State of Illinois, a stripper and a law […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-literary-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}