The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Welcome to 2011! What do we call this decade, anyway? Who will win the Super Bowl? What will become of health care reform? How many New York City snowplows does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Some questions are impossible to answer.
...more“In America, we tend to think belief trumps knowledge. To tease out the truth from the fabric of lies that surrounds us requires a certain degree of intelligence. Which is bad news for us, alas.
...more“A year earlier, I’d celebrated my birthday with an all-night bash. The writing was going well, I went out dancing every night. Now I stared into snowy gloom and wondered what I’d been thinking.”
...moreToday, in Books, Andrea Scrima reviews Jessica Treadway’s latest collection, Please Come Back to Me. Treadway won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2009. Read the review.
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A funny thing happened on the way to the “angry grrrl rock revolution which seeks to save the psychic and cultural lives of girls and women everywhere”…
Rumpus Books asked some of our favorite writers what they will be reading as we leave the aughts behind and sally forth into a new decade.
Ray was failing at being a person. He’d been fooled by life. It had triumphed over him. I wanted to call out to him, over his wife’s head, Hey Ray, life has triumphed over you.
When my father left and my mother went crazy and carved into every wooden surface of our house a name that wasn’t hers or his, I asked what she was doing. She made me get down the dictionary. “Simoom,” I read…
...moreIn her new short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck, Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie moves back and forth between two continents the way she has in real life. Adichie depicts contemporary middle class Nigeria, as well as the lives of Nigerian women newly arrived in the United States—wives, girlfriends of Americans, au pairs—adjusting to a new country.
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Ah, the lovely march of Spring… Who can deny the splendor and joy that May hath wrought?
This week, Rumpus Books published reviews of new novels, short story collections, and volumes of poetry, and capped off National Poetry Month with a Supersized Rumpus Original Combo (or S-ROC, as we like to call it) with poet D.A. Powell.
National Poetry Month is over, but you can still read great poetry on The Rumpus. We published a new poem every day in April, including work from D.A. Powell, Michelle Tea, Sean Hill, T.R. Hummer, Carolyn Guinzio, Brian Teare, Elizabeth Bradfield, Randall Mann, and many others.
This one’s not a joke.
Poet Craig Arnold has been missing in Japan for three days. The latest news we’ve heard is that the U.S. has sent helicopters and personnel to assist local authorities in searching a small volcanic island where he had been hiking.
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Famed producer Quincy Jones has asked President Obama to establish a cabinet-level position for culture and the arts. An online petition already has almost 300,000 signatures. Add your name to the list!
At The Rumpus, we believe that a healthy literary culture is one which embraces writing of all kinds, by authors of all stripes – young and old, established and emerging, traditional and experimental, writing from the margins or from (or about) the heart of mainstream culture, published by “major” houses or by smaller presses.
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Usually, if I read a review of a book and think it sounds like something I’d love, it isn’t. A recent exception is Rivka Galchen’s Atmospheric Disturbances, surely one of the strangest novels of recent years. Though the name of Jorge Luis Borges frequently comes up with regards to Galchen’s novel, I think that’s a red herring, a side-effect of part of Atmospheric Disturbances taking place in Argentina; the real name here is Vladimir Nabokov, whose tutelage on the infinite plasticity and intrinsic conflicts of point of view Galchen has chewed up, digested, and spat out to terrifying effect.
The Rumpus dispatched dozens of our top reporters to Chicago. None of them were heard from again.
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The National Book Critics Circle has started an online petition to save The Washington Post’s Book World.
After months of speculation, and a piece in The New Yorker‘s “Talk of the Town,” it’s official:
Rumpus Books asked dozens of writers what they’ll be reading on New Year’s Day, 2009. Here’s what they said:
Marie Arana, the longtime editor of The Washington Post’s Book World is stepping down tomorrow. “For 15 years I have had the privilege and honor
What makes the Holocaust such a juicy target for literary exaggeration
From The New York Times: In these times of plummeting consumer confidence and evaporating labor markets, it is time to address the problem head on. We must now go boldly forward and bail out the writers. Read more…
...moreI Have Fun Everywhere I Go
Memoirs can be split into two rough camps: those that place their narrator front and center, and those focused on external events. The former narcissistically inflates its protagonist, even when describing misbehavior or abjection – it says my experience is exemplary, my challenges or tragedies can illuminate your life.
Less than a year after Houghton Mifflin bought Harcourt, the new entity – Houghton Mifflin Harcourt – seems to be collapsing. Two weeks ago, it was announced – and then retracted, and then sorta-kinda reannounced – that HMH was freezing acquisitions (i.e.
Got an hour to listen to an amazing short story? Watch this year’s Pulitzer Prize poet, and former U.S. Poet Laureate, introduce Cornelia Nixon, who reads her short story, “Beach Bunnies,” at UC Berkeley’s Story Hour, on November 6, 2008.
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