The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Rumpus Book Club and Poetry Book Club members have one great advantage over readers everywhere else: you get to read new work before anyone else (except some reviewers) gets to. (You can join at any time.) You get to talk about those books with a host of online members all during the month (around 350 between the two clubs) and best of all, chat with the authors online at the end of the month.
...moreSay you’re a person who needs good books to read, and say you like chatting with people about good books and say you’d like it if some people you trust recommended good books to you and say they’re recommending books before they’re even available in stores.
...moreThis is the 5th(!) year that The Rumpus has done a National Poetry Month project, wherein we run a new, previously unpublished poem each day of the month (and sometimes we edge a little bit into May–we refuse to be tyrannized by calendars).
...moreIt was with great sadness that we heard the news this morning of the passing of Emily Rapp’s son Ronan. Ronan suffered from Tay-Sachs, a genetic disease caused by the absence of a vital enzyme called Hex-A, which causes cells to become damaged, resulting in progressive neurological disorders.
...moreThe Book Clubs are rocking right now with this month’s selections, George Saunders’s Tenth of December and Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair, but there’s some great stuff on the horizon.
...moreThere’s more violence in Gaza today. Emily Hauser asks a tough question about Israeli claims that its strikes are surgical and aimed at terrorists.
The IDF used social media to announce and live-blog the attacks, and to celebrate the killing of Ahmed Al-Jabari.
...moreIt’s finally here, election day, and even if we don’t know who the winner is by the time the west coast polls close (and please, merciful gods, do not make that happen), we do know one thing will end tonight: candidate ads.
...moreIn our earlier roundup about Hurricane Sandy, we linked to this piece from The Atlantic’s Garance Franke-Ruta which quotes Governor Mitt Romney in 2011 at a Republican debate. He was talking about government spending in the context of a concern that FEMA was running out of money for dealing with national emergencies.
...moreYou do now. Join occasional Rumpus contributors Elisa Gabbert and Sommer Browning as they live-tweet “The Shining,” tonight at 9:00 p.m. Eastern, 6:00 p.m. Pacific. Why don’t I include the other time zones? Because we do the conversion automatically.
Follow the hashtag #redrum or follow Elisa and Sommer (I do!) at their respective Twitter handles @egabbert and @vagtalk.
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First things first: you don’t have to be a fan of Weldon Kees to enjoy this book. Shameful confession: until I read the note that precedes the table of contents, I’d never even heard of Weldon Kees or his Robinson poems, which Kathleen Rooney explodes into this novel in verse.
...moreBack in July of 2010, The Rumpus started a poetry version of its book club. Board member Camille Dungy selected Shane Book’s Ceiling of Sticks to start us off and we’ve never looked back. Here’s a rundown of the book club for potential members–what you’ll get and what you would have gotten if you’d been with us from the beginning.
...moreA Brief History of the Rumpus Book Club
The Rumpus Book Club kicked off on May 19, 2010, when Stephen decided to announce it in his Daily Rumpus in his own special way: “Today we’re launching The Rumpus Book Club! That’s a pretty quick turn around when you realize I just had this idea yesterday.
...moreScroll down to the most recent Rumpus Sunday Interview, the one where Sunday Editor Gina Frangello writes “I was going to use the word “genius,” but maybe that’s not quite right for a man who spends seventeen years honing one brilliant book.”
See that guy?
...moreYesterday afternoon, the story I knew was that an Israeli Jew filmmaker had put out a trailer that offended Libyan Muslims so much that they’d stormed the US consulate in Benghazi and murdered US Ambassador Chris Stevens and 3 consulate staff members.
...moreAnd we love you back.
While I’m at it, a little update news. Our current book is Kathleen Alcott’s The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets–Bookslut covered it here and said “It’s never simple, but if complicated is what produces a novel like this one, we should be grateful for the messy, the broken, and the quiet graces they birth, the camaraderie that can find us in even the most isolating of nightmares.”
We’re very excited to announce that our October book is Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins.
...moreFor weeks now, the Romney campaign has run ads claiming that President Obama has gutted the work requirement for welfare recipients.
The response has varied. Fact checkers Politifact and the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler have called this attack what it is–a lie.
...moreRumpus Book Club members this month have been devouring Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and we’ll be chatting with Straub about her book this Wednesday night. Poetry Book Club members have been all over Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Dante’s Inferno, and we’ll be chatting with her on Thursday.
...moreBefore yesterday, I suspect most people outside Missouri had never heard of Representative Todd Akin. I barely recognized the name myself, even though I consider myself a bit of a political junkie and I currently live in the neighboring state. All I really knew is that he was beating Senator Claire McCaskill pretty handily in her re-election bid, and that the Democrats were likely to lose that seat come November.
...moreSorry. I couldn’t resist the chance to make a bad joke. I tried to work people having beef with the company into the title but it was too cumbersome.
Anyway, if you haven’t heard (and I don’t know how you haven’t, honestly), the folks who own and run Chik-Fil-A are conservative Christians who “support the traditional family,” which I guess means they support polygamous marriages where a patriarch can take two sisters as wives and bear children with not only them but their two slave girls.
...moreIf you’re a member of the Rumpus Poetry Book Club (and if you aren’t, here you go), then you should have received your copy of Leigh Stein’s Dispatch From the Future weeks ago. If, however, you are among the unfortunate people who had to actually wait for the book’s official release, then today is your day.
...moreFirst things first–Don’t call it the God Particle, even if you are making a joke about about the particle going to church.
Don’t understand the big deal? Don’t sweat it–you’re not alone. The Vancouver Sun has a photo gallery with helpful captions to help you out.
...moreUnless you’ve been away from a news source all day, you’ve probably heard that the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, as constitutional by a vote of 5-4. Probably the biggest surprise was that Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the decision for the majority, while perennial swing vote Anthony Kennedy sided with Justices Scalia, Thomas and Alito in a fairly whiny dissent.
...moreMy favorite Supreme Court watcher, Dahlia Lithwick, is hosting her yearly round table on SCOTUS decisions over at Slate. Joining her this year are Judge Richard Posner and Professor Walter Dellinger.
The Supreme Court handed down a number of decisions today, but not the big one on the Affordable Care Act.
...moreThe Rumpus Book Club has been having a great time with this month’s selection, Elizabeth Crane’s We Only Know So Much, and the Poetry Book Club has been taking Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts with them everywhere. But we’re nearly halfway through the month.
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The Rumpus Book Club talks with Emily St. John Mandel about The Lola Quartet, panthers in Florida, her writing process, and more.
...moreThe answer for me, in this case, is among a group of statues on the Drake University campus in Des Moines, IA. I’m reading from our June Poetry Book Club selection, Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts. I’ve posted video of this act in our new Facebook group for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club.
...moreOur April poet, Carmen Giménez Smith, was featured on NPR’s NewsPoet series. (NewsPoet has featured Rumpus Poetry Book Club poet and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith as well.) Check it out.
And if you’d like to become a member of the Poetry Book Club–we’re talking about Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s collection The Ground right now–click here.
...moreTo almost no one’s surprise, last night North Carolina became the 31st state to ban same-sex marriage. This is the second time North Carolina has done this–the first time was just a state law; this one was a Constitutional amendment. This Constitutional amendment, though, does more than simply ban same-sex marriage.
...moreHarriet, the Poetry Foundation blog, reports that poet Joshua Clover and 11 students at UC Davis are potentially facing a $1 million fine and up to 11 years each in prison. Their crime? Peaceful protest.
A petition is circulating which demands that UC Davis drop all charges, and if I hear about any other plans to pressure the UC Davis administration, I’ll update this post to reflect them.
...moreI grew up in the Deep South in the 70′s and 80′s, where unions were limited in number and power by Orwellian-named “right-to-work” laws, so I thought May Day involved kids with streamers dancing around a pole. Not that I ever actually saw that either, but there were pictures in books.
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