The Rumpus Book Club is proudly presenting Zipper Mouth, Laurie Weeks’s debut novel as our October pick. Published by the Feminist Press, it tells the story of a New York junkie, along with the “exalted night-club epiphanies” and “devastating morning-after hangovers.” And the book comes with a ringing endorsement from Michelle Tea. An excerpt was published in Dave Eggers’s The Best American Nonrequired Reading.

We are doubling your literary thrills with one more autumnal announcement; November’s Book Club selection is Love and Shame and Love (Little, Brown), a novel by Peter Orner (whose column you can follow here on the Rumpus). Orner traverses three generations of the Popper family, through which he considers the intricate realties of the American family.  The esteemed and hilarious Daniel Handler called it “epic like Gilgamesh and epic like a guitar solo,” which is both apt and all-encompassing praise. …more

Should book reviews be reserved for the literary elite? Isn’t it important for a book to win the respect of the general public?

These are the questions that distinguish book reviews from blog reviews, which is essential in our forging a new literary culture. This literary culture is being quantified and boiled down to a science at the Stanford Literary Lab, whose research is showing the ways of our “cultural transmissions.”

The Atlantic recently ran an article entitled “Why Americans Love Chain Stores: A Psychological Perspective,” and not only does it break down our metropolitan American tendencies, but it explains them in terms of our psychological issues.

Our ideals about American independence give way to our obsession with chain stores. We are restless and like to move around but are also comforted by the consistency and familiarity that chain stores provide. This essay’s like therapy plus a lesson on contemporary American urban planning.

“We defend to the last the right to pursue our own desires, but when it comes time to exercise that right, it turns out most of us desire to pull out of the driveway, head toward the main suburban strip, and turn into Walmart, Target, Home Depot, etc.”

(via Arts & Letters Daily)

Roxane Gay’s on HTML Giant talking about the covers of chick-lit novels and the stigma attached to their formulaic visual coding, though the feminization of book covers is taking over more than just the chick-lit genre. It’s unfortunate that women writers have to consciously avoid being pigeonholed into chick-lit genre or are marketed via book cover designs as such. Why are women forced to defend their writing as serious and distinct chick-lit?

“The far more serious problem is the sexism (or is it misogyny?) fueling this conversation, the sexism that makes women feel so defensive and that encourages people to dismiss or disrespect women’s books whether they are ‘chick lit’ or women’s fiction or literary fiction. Until we recognize and address the sexism at work here, we’ll continue wearing ourselves out by dealing with symptoms rather than the disease.”

“Poetry occupies a cultural space in Contemporary American Society somewhere between Tap Dancing and Ventriloquism.”

How do you claim some of this space as your very own? The Awl has a handy guide on how to construct a love poem, even instructing on the timing of its presentation, the step before the actual writing (staring at the blank paper), using the acrostic method as a prompt, and more! If you are wary of poetic guidance, there is always the underlying comforting message in this essay that poetry is for everyone. Thus, this guide should be checked out.

In 1958 Ian Fleming and Raymond Chandler discussed each other’s writing in this BBC interview. Being seasoned wordsmiths on the subject, they discuss what makes a British thriller versus an American thriller (apparently “thriller” is an elusive term), heroes and villains and frustrations with bestseller lists. This conversation is definitely worth a listen!

Max Eastman was elected to be the editor of the Masses, the magazine that birthed the modern gag cartoon, fittingly described as such: “…the magazine leaned away from the conventions of the establishment and toward the eccentricities of bohemians everywhere. Politically, the magazine was more socialist than anything else, and in those days, before the U.S. entry into World War I and before the Russian Revolution, socialism wasn’t a bad thing.”

Thus it was the perfect context for political cartooning. Read about Max Eastman and bravery of early political cartooning pioneers.

(via the Paris Review Daily)

Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson academically quarrel in a series of letters, written to assuage the pain of illness that was afflicting them both.

They’ve got a shared “literary curiosity,” but the specifics of their understanding of Western literature reveal that they mostly just disagreed. Still, witnessing the correspondence of two intelligent frenemies is worth experiencing, so I recommend checking this out.

(via The Millions)

The Millions has an essay on sexual violence and its literary and cinematic representations. Is it better to represent sexual violence through a code of silence, through allusions and subtlety or explicitly? Books and films that portray sexual violence diverge in these ways. There is an often-unspoken tension when it comes to praising representations of violence—it’s a difficult thing to appreciate the artfulness in something while acknowledging its graphic darkness.

“Even for those with the determination to endure these films and find value in them, the experience, whatever the intellectual payoff, is inevitably tinged with a feeling of troubling complicity and fallenness: Am I self-hating? A misogynist? A sadist? A pervert? Is human nature really so ugly, so capable of ugliness? Did I enjoy that? Does having gotten something out of that movie make me a “a bad person”?

Read more here.

Broke-Ass Stuart’s on an East Coast book tour, proselytizing the spendthrift lifestyle in select cities. He will be speaking and providing signatures for his book Young, Broke, and Beautiful: Broke-Ass Stuart’s Guide to Living Cheaply. And there will be DJs and dancing. Check out the Facebook page for tour details.

Michael Kenneth Williams, the actor who played Omar on the highly-praised HBO series The Wire, is interviewed on Mother Jones. The show is often described as “the greatest television show ever made,” and Williams offers his perspective on why the show has been so successful.

“You can go anywhere in the world and you can find a version of The Wire. Social injustice, the breakdown of the system, those issues are universal, and David [Simon] and Ed [Burns], man, the way they put the pen to the paper, it made it very digestible and very compatible to any race, to any genre, any age bracket, it didn’t matter. If you’ve ever felt oppressed on any level, there’s something from The Wire that you can take and identify with.”

Eve’s Diary, Mark Twain’s retelling of Adam and Eve, is back on Charlton, MA library shelves after a 105-year absence. The book was banned due to seemingly explicit illustrations (though they “now seem quite chaste”). Its return is timely—this Saturday marks the beginning of Banned Books Week, celebrating literary freedom. One-hundred years late is better than never!

If you’re publicly expressing resentment towards America’s most beloved (animated) family, you should expect a response. Letters of Note published Marge Simpson’s response to Barbara Bush’s declaration that the Simpson’s was “the dumbest thing” she’d ever seen. The subject of what makes the ideal American family is a contentious one, but alas, there is always room for acceptance.

The Daily Beast published an interactive infographic, mapping out where “women are winning.” “Winning” is measured along the lines of justice, health, education, economy and power. Iceland is apparently full of female champions.

Wes Wilson was the rock-poster guru of the 60’s. His designs were used by the Beatles, the Doors and are so site-specifically San Francisco, from those art-filled days where you could rent a room for 30 bucks a month.

He talks about the age of pre-computer designing, 60’s San Francisco and the evolution of his psychedelic aesthetic in this interview with Collector’s Weekly.

Here’s more fuel for the dialogue on brick and mortar bookstores and their integral role in creating and supporting the literary community. HTML Giant’s got a double dose of input on the subject—a video of Matthew Stadler delineating the difference between readers and shoppers, and an essay in The Stranger by Paul Constant, encouraging us to take action.

Anonymous, the hacker group for whom digital barriers are no obstacle, just landed a book deal. The book will reveal the inside scoop (tentatively titled Tales From Inside the Accidental Cyberwar) and will be coauthored by Gregg Housh and Barrett Brown. While you wait for this impending publication, you can check out our interview with Cole Stryker who covered this subject in his book, Epic Win for Anonymous.

“An authoritative book would make the organization and its activism accessible beyond media coverage and, among other things, those other books on the matter, Mr. Housh noted, as he bemoaned the dearth of accurate information on the subject.”

Will Shortz, the puzzle mastermind behind the NY Times Crossword Puzzle, is revealing his strategies to the Atlantic. He goes through the whole process—fishing the right crossword from the submission slush pile, and then the major clue editing and revising that happens before the final puzzle in produced.

(via the Millions)

(via @Jennifer_Sky)

When writer Melissa Febos’ book came out (which some of you got to hear her read at last month’s monthly Rumpus), she found a reason to shed the long sleeves and expose her tattoos to the college classes she taught. Her book revealed her heroine-addicted, professional dominatrix past, and the year it was published was in her words, “the most terrifying and liberating year of my life.”

A year later she accepted a position at a college in upstate New York with her girlfriend and pit bull and upon the first day of her move, “remembered how much easier it is being the person you think other people want you to be.” Read about her Brooklyn to country transition.

The tapes of Jackie O’s interview with Arthur Schlesinger, four months after her husband’s assassination were not supposed to be released until fifty years after her death. Her daughter Caroline Kennedy ended up releasing them early (the result of an ABC deal) and released them in a book, co-authored with the historian Michael Beschloss. Why are there those who idolize Jackie O and those that dismiss her role as a Stepford wife-like First Lady? Here’s why we should appreciate her, as told by Laurie Fendrich.

“I agree that Jackie didn’t do anything in the way women now do things. Yet it was no small feat that she introduced to Americans, and the world, the idea that an American could be cultured—could behave with decorum in public, speak foreign languages, love books (in particular, Jackie loved reading history), and love and promote art and music. At the time, who woulda thunk it? (Who would think it today?)”

Diane Ravitch walks us through the history of school issues and the failed reform policies in the American educational system. The black-white achievement gap, test scores that diverge along socioeconomic lines and the failures of the No Child Left Behind legislation—Ravitch goes through it all.  This is a longreads that will catch you up on the intricacies of American educational reform.

California state prisons are releasing their female inmates that are mothers so they can serve the rest of their sentencing under house arrest. This is bold change for incarceration in California and a result of the overcrowded prisons. Read more here.

“The program is ‘a step in breaking the intergenerational cycle of incarceration,’ state prisons Secretary Matthew Cate said, arguing that ‘family involvement is one of the biggest indicators of an inmate’s rehabilitation.’”

(via The Awl)

One would hope that there has been steady progress in terms of the presence of women writers in television, but a recent San Diego State study suggests quite the opposite.

Their Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film quantifies the gender breakdown annually. The number of women writing for television’s broadcast network has actually been cut if half since the 2006-7 television season. Could it be that diversity was more of a priority in the past decade than it is now? Maureen Ryan asks seasoned television writers to find out why this backward-progress has happened.

(via BookBeast)

A little bit of James Dean has been preserved in the recently-uncovered love letters he wrote to his girlfriend Barbara Glenn. They’re dated from 1954, the year before he was killed in an auto accident and also during the period of his rising stardom.

(via @Book Bench)

There are those companies that don’t pay their writers to produce content in order to save money, and then there is this. Narrative Science software produces content. It’s being used by twenty companies in order to avoid taking on more writers (and thereby paying more writers) to turn data into a news piece.

“The Narrative Science technology could potentially impact many corners of the writing trade. The company has a long list of stories they can computerize: sports stories, financial reports, real estate analyses, local community content, polling & elections, advertising campaign summaries sales & operations reports and market research.”

(via @ElectricLit)

Poets & Writers recently ranked the country’s MFA programs, and as rankings often do, it is being received with some hostility. Their hierarchy of MFA programs is based on the word of mouth of MFA applicants, rather than the US News-style algorithm (which has got its own controversy).

Though the ranking did come with a disclaimer, this wasn’t enough precaution to preclude the backlash— it incited around two hundred faculty members from creative writing programs far and wide to craft an open letter describing the irresponsibility of such an unscientific ranking system. Ranking systems are often questionable, but aren’t such biases even more pronounced with these creative degrees?

“…it’s not black and white, and when you think about it, programs like these aren’t really that rankable. What if your favorite writer teaches at a program at the bottom of the list? What qualifies as a successful graduate: a creative-writing teacher, a best-selling novelist, or someone who has honed his or her writing in an extraordinary way but fails to put it to work professionally?”

Carolyn Kellogg of the LA Times reviews Chris Colin’s Blindsight which tells the story of film producer Simon Lewis, and his journey to recovery following a major car crash. Kellogg has great things to say (“Lewis’ story is sprawling and fascinating and is told with sensitivity and intelligence by Colin”). You can dig up our sweet interview with Colin here.

Amazon is introducing a new service that presents a noncommittal book-buying option for customers. The company is considering a Netflix-like rental service for ebooks, which unfortunately, only provides more opportunity to devalue books. And this devaluing has only caused publishers to be skeptical of this rental-based selling point for ebooks. Let’s hope it doesn’t do to booksellers what Netflix did to the video store.