I get a lot of galleys in the mail because of my role as the Fiction Editor over at The Nervous Breakdown.  Sometimes, a strange number of these seem to have phrases like “Mr. Darcy” or “Sisterhood” in the titles, and it is clear that said galleys have been sent to the wrong target reader.  Other times, there seems to be so much good shit flying around out there that it’s overwhelming and I can’t keep up.

Here are some (non-exhaustive) highlights, all linked through one of the greatest bookstores in the country, Women & Children First, here in Chicago, which kicks Amazon’s ass and makes buying a hardcover book a truly excellent act:

 *

Carry the One by Carol Anshaw.  I’m reading it right now and it’s gripping and, for a novel about an accidental murder, pretty damn sexy.  Art and addiction and hot lesbians and lots of messy, real life drama, this would be a hard novel not to like.

All Woman and Springtime by Brandon W. Jones.  Alice Walker is calling this new title from Algonquin Books, set in North Korea, one of the most “important novels I’ve read in many years.”

What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher R. Beha.  This Tin House June release, a story of obsession, friendship and the power of storytelling, packs a great deal of intensity into a slim volume.

The Angry Buddhist by Seth Greenland.  I’m not usually a big fan of satire, but this one caught me by being set amidst the same weird, desert meth trailers that Stacy Bierlein and I routinely get lost en route amidst en route to do a guest faculty gig through U-C-Riverside.  But it’s a wild read, and now I’m getting hooked.

The Lola Quartet by Emily St. John Mandel.  If you haven’t read Mandel’s first two books, you’re missing out on one of the most compelling and eloquent young voices in recent fiction.  Her third novel, exploring mysteries of identity, reinvention and disappearance (Mandel’s core themes, in much the same way they are Dan Chaon’s), more than lives up to that early promise.

Girlchild by Tupelo Hassman. A gritty, moving depiction of poor white trailer trash (and Girl Scouts), this debut novel has powerful, messy humanity and dark humor to spare.

Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty by Diane Williams. I haven’t read it yet, but it’s Diane Williams and it’s new work.  Need I say more?

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Dear Sugar,

Please oh please help me. I’m so mixed up and in so much pain that I’m beginning to be afraid I might kill myself, though I have two small children and basically know I can’t and would never, and I definitely know how crazy and self-dramatizing that is. The very fact that I think of killing myself when I am a mother is scaring the shit out of me.

I am somewhat unhappily married to a complicated man, who is also a wonderful man in many ways—aren’t we all both monsters and nice people? During my last pregnancy I very unwisely started an inappropriate correspondence with an ex from high school online. (Thanks, Facebook!) I knew what I was doing was wrong. I knew I was lonely and angry at my husband for all the reasons people in their 30s with little kids get angry at each other (just a little more so in our case). Somehow I thought I could get away with crossing a little line without it turning into anything. I was faithful, a good wife, a good person, a pillar of her community, a good friend, “I would never,” etc….

Well, this ex and I fell in love. I turned out that he is a cross-dresser (I didn’t know about it in high-school) and I’ve always been kind of wanting to be a lesbian, but not really into girls (I’ve tried). We both have serious abuse in our backgrounds. We both feel like together we could be complete, ourselves, intimate in ways that we’ve never even imagined being with another person. I know how cliché that is, though it feels different in this case (another cliché!) because of the fetish and power-exchange aspects of our relationship.

I’ve only been aware of the extent of the physical and psycho-sexual abuse in my childhood since starting therapy a few years ago. (I originally started therapy with my husband, pre-affair, and it sort of improved things until this….) The affair has been mainly virtual, though my love and I have seen each other once. Though it has now been going on for over a year, the “active affair” have been only for short periods of time. I can correspond with my love for about a month, before the guilt and pain and horror and fear make me stop.

As I said, I have tiny children. I’m so afraid of leaving my husband to raise them on my own or without my husband’s emotional and logistical support. I’m so sad to hurt and abandon my husband, whose life has not been easy either. He’s done shitty things to me in the past few years, but he doesn’t deserve this. I’ve gone for periods of one to three months totally out of touch with my love, but I just feel sadder and more depressed and darker and more lonely without him. He can and would move to my city and be with me. But if I left my husband I would be in uncharted waters.

I often fear that I’m losing my mind. I am in therapy, and have discussed medication with my therapist, but it’s hard to believe that my problem is medication-requiring when it seems so situational. My therapist hasn’t come down strongly one way or another. I’m currently in another it’s-finally-over phase with my love, but it doesn’t feel over at all. Also, I feel so miserable around my husband that sometimes I can barely talk. I’m drinking, I’m smoking, I’m watching TV. I’m hiding behind the children. I want to just tell my husband the truth and then let everyone deal with the situation like adults, but I have received legal advice that says that it would be foolish and crazy to give my husband information about the affair and the fetish aspects (which I feel like is crucial to any of this making sense and being true) when facing a custody battle.

My husband works long hours and I am the primary caretaker of our children (see: how we got ourselves into this mess in the first place), but he has already told me that he’ll fight me for custody to his last breath if I try to leave him. He’s a powerful guy and very tenacious. I’m trying to love him and get over these feelings and absorb and accept that this is my life and I can’t change it, but, again, the darkness….

What can I do? Can you help? The last piece of semi-relevant information here might be that though I know I sound hysterical and dramatic and possibly dangerous, this is so out of character for me. I’ve always been the person with her shit together, self-sufficient, there in other people’s times of need and so on.

I really pray you answer my letter. Thank you.

Despair Girl

***

Dear Despair Girl,

The only time I’ve ever felt certain that I was about to die was on the last day of the year in 1991. I was 23 years old and sitting in the passenger seat of a borrowed SUV that was being driven by my ex-husband along a cold country highway at eight o’clock in the morning. We were heading north on an hours-long drive to a New Year’s Eve gathering with a small group of our friends who’d rented a cabin in the woods. We’d left our apartment in the city just after dawn in hopes of reaching our destination in time to go cross-country skiing before the sun went down.

There was no traffic. In fact, only occasionally did another car pass by, going the opposite direction. The road was set slightly above the rest of the terrain, the ditches dropping off steeply before flattening out and giving way to the woods beyond, all of it covered by a few feet of snow. Winter in the Upper Midwest. We were moving along at something like 58 miles an hour until suddenly the SUV was careening sideways toward the ditch on the other side of the road, having hit, apparently a patch of black ice.

“Get control of the car,” I said to my ex-husband calmly and quietly as we swerved perilously from one side of the road to the other, each correction an over-correction that sent us lurching horribly on. “Get control of the car,” I repeated in the same tone, as if I could will it to happen.

But he could not get control of the car. There was no relationship between what he was doing with the steering wheel and brakes and what the vehicle we were in was doing with us. We seemed to pick up speed instead of slow as we swooped sickeningly from one side of the highway to the other until finally, in one excruciatingly long glide, we left the road and became airborne.

I’ll never forget the feeling of that—flying in the car—and also how long that moment was, though I’m sure it was over in a flash. In this strange span of time, I understood that I was probably going to die in something like five seconds and my feelings about that moved from so deeply sad to so deeply accepting so quickly that it’s astonishing to remember it now. No! Please! Okay! is what I thought with breathless clarity. The other thing that happened in that glimmer of time between leaving the road and landing wherever we’d land was that neither my ex-husband nor I braced ourselves. Instead, we simultaneously reached to clutch each other with both of our hands and, together, in the same instant, shouted I LOVE YOU!

And then, instantly, we went down. Nose first. There was a tremendous slow motion thud followed by a ferocious blur as we tumbled end over end over end over end until at last we came to a stop among the trees.

It was so silent then. I don’t know if there’s ever been a moment so silent in my life since. Me. My ex-husband. The road somewhere like a mute film of a far off dream. We looked at each other. It took me a while to understand that we were upside down, hanging by the seat belts that had saved us. We were covered in tiny blunt shards of glass and drenched with a red liquid that I later comprehended was wine—bottles we’d brought along for the evening’s festivities that had shattered in the tumult. But we were alive.

I was shaken by the accident, but not for the reasons it would seem I’d be shaken—not the frightful careening or the terrifying flight or the violent tumbling. I was shaken by the beauty of that moment when my ex-husband let go of the steering wheel and we both did and said the exact same thing without thinking about it or agreeing upon it or hesitating. In the end, we clutched each other and shouted our love. I didn’t want to die, but if I was going to, I was glad to be doing it with him. It’s one of the purest revelations of my life.

This, even though I was already aching to leave him. Even though a little more than two years later I did. Even though it’s been more than a decade since I’ve even spoken to him.

You may wonder what any of this has to do with you, Despair Girl, and I’ve wondered the same thing. But in the eleven weeks since you wrote to me it’s the story that keeps surfacing when I ponder your conundrum. Maybe it’s because I can feel you almost viscerally sliding down the empty road, knowing you’re going to crash but not knowing what it is you’ll crash into. Maybe because the question you’re up against is who you’re going to grab when you go airborne. Maybe it’s because at the time of this car accident I was basically where you are, in the gnarly thick of transformation, and I didn’t know where I was going to land or how.

"Sugar Says" poster

I used to see a butterfly in my mind’s eye every time I heard the word transformation, but life has schooled me. Transformation isn’t a butterfly. It’s the thing before you get to be a pretty bug flying away. It’s huddling in the dark cocoon and then pushing your way out. It’s sitting there in your pajamas, pregnant with your second child, flirting on Facebook with someone you dated in high school. It’s imagining you might leave your husband for a man you’ve seen only once during the most stressful time in your adult life and thinking it will work out. It’s the messy work you have ahead of you, Despair, of making sense of your fortunes and misfortunes, desires and doubts, hangups and sorrows, actions and accidents, mistakes and successes, so you can go on and become the person you must next become. The one who doesn’t wallow in her own despair.

It doesn’t surprise me everything seems like its unraveling for you right now. These recent years during which you’ve become a mother have been radically transformative, for both you and your marriage. Having children is the greatest joy for most parents, but it’s also a major mindfuck. All the terms change. Some are rewritten for you, others you rewrite yourself—personally, practically, professionally, romantically, sexually, financially, logistically and otherwise.

Click here to purchase the Sugar two-pack!

My own marriage to Mr. Sugar during those first few post-partum years was not so different from yours. We were more bonded than ever because we needed each other like never before, but there was loneliness and anger too. After our second child was born we slept in separate beds for months so I could dedicate my nights to tending to our newborn while he tended to our toddler. One time I got so mad at Mr. Sugar about the fact that every time he goes to the grocery store he only manages to remember half the stuff we need, I stabbed him in the thigh with my toothbrush. One time I brought our kids to their preschool and I came home and told Mr. Sugar that I had the impulse to ask one of the preschool dads I’d chatted with at drop-off to go with me to a hotel, where we would spend the morning fucking each other’s brains out. Not because I had any real desire for this other fellow. Not that I wanted to cheat on my beloved and hot Mr. Sugar. But because I wanted to spend the morning with someone who wanted to fuck my brains out who was not also someone whom I’d stabbed with a toothbrush in the course of a conflict about groceries.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that you began your online emotional affair while you were pregnant with your second baby and mothering your first. Nor is it surprising that you reached back in time and sought solace and excitement with a man who knew you long ago, who desired you before you were a mother and clobbered by all that being the primary caregiver of two small children entails. You say that you’re aware that your outsized feelings for your ex and your justifications about the affair you’re having with him are cliché, but your self-awareness does not let you off the hook. Instead, it tells me you already suspect what you don’t want to know: that this ex, as particular as he seems, could be anyone. That what you have with him is so steeped in fantasy it might be made entirely of smoke. That your affair with him is not about you and him, but rather you holding up a mirror to yourself, your every desire for a different life reflected back to you.

And that the whole shebang is stoked by lust. Which is famously unreliable as a life plan.

I feel sort of like an asshole saying this to you because I know your feelings for your ex are terribly real. I sympathize with your heartache. But I would be remiss not to tell you in the most direct terms possible that pretty much nothing you said about your husband makes me think you can’t work it out with him if you want to and everything you said about your ex sounds sketchy to me. Not because he’s sketchy—I trust he’s a perfectly lovely human being—but because you, Despair Girl, hit a patch of black ice and right now you’re careening around, unsure where or when you’ll stop. Do any internal alarm bells go off when you hear yourself say that a man you’ve known almost exclusively online in the course of a year-long off-and-on illicit affair makes you feel “complete”? Anything go beep, beep, BEEP! when you review the portion of your letter in which you mention in passing that you and your husband had “sort of improved things until” you began your affair?

I think the answer is yes. I think that’s why you wrote to me. I think your lusty virtual fantasy love is your delicious escape from a marriage strained by too much drudgery and resentment. And yet, where has this delicious escape brought you? To the place where you’re in so much pain you ponder crazy things like killing yourself, that’s where.

You have to go somewhere else, sweet pea. You have to move beyond despair. You have to find the next version of yourself, the more evolved iteration of the woman you used to be.

You don’t do that by choosing between accepting your misery with one man you love or giving way to the fantastical idea of another. You do that by coming to terms with who it is you’ve become and doing the emotional work it requires to let that woman fly. That’s where I was on that day in 1991 when I truly thought I was going to die: a woman about to lacerate the shit out herself while pushing away her own cocoon. When that SUV left the road, it wasn’t just any day. It was the last day of the year in which my mother had died and everything that year had changed.

I was on the brink of being forced to change too. I left a man I loved so much I was content to die beside him. I did it because my purer revelation—more pure than my love for him—was that I couldn’t be the person I’d become while committed to him. In another time, in my marriage with Mr. Sugar, I’ve had transformations that led me in the other direction—toward a richer, more profound commitment, and a happier one too.

I can’t say which it’s going to be for you—whether you should reinvest in the intimacy you have or squander it for the promise of a new love. But I know you have to work harder to find the answer that’s within you. The truth will come to you once you stop careening. Don’t brace yourself. Clutch onto whatever you love the most when the tires leave the road.

Yours,
Sugar

You can follow Sugar on Twitter here.

Or join her Facebook fan page here.

And don’t forget the Dear Sugar Google Group, where you can get a little extra Sugar once a week.

***

Got a problem?

Hit the Sugar spot: sugar@therumpus.net or, if you prefer to keep your question 100% anonymous, use my form by clicking the button below. Either way, by submitting a question you are agreeing to our terms statement.

[Editor’s note: If you prefer to keep your question 100% anonymous it is best to use the button below.]

Fill Out My Form!

Related Posts:

• Sugar’s Coming Out Party!
• Sugar Says
• DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #95: The Dudes In the Woods Debacle
• DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #92: Your Invisible Inner Terrible Someone
• DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #91: A Big Life

It was in black and white, except for the flashbacks, which were in color. Maybe colorized. An American pilot crash-landed in a wet field outside a French village and was taken in by a family whose daughter, the pilot came to suspect, was a Nazi collaborator. She was beautiful, and not in a movie actress way, and I remember thinking that maybe this was an Italian neorealist film, but it didn’t make sense that it was set in France and that the dialog was in English. There was a dog with a limp, I remember, that was poisoned and that died terribly and melodramatically, clawing at its own stomach, and that’s when the pilot began to suspect that the daughter was on the Nazi side, and that she had murdered the dog—her own dog from childhood—to prove her allegiance to the Reich somehow.

There was a castle-like factory, I think, not far from the farm house that sheltered the American pilot, and that’s where he and the girl went to have long, philosophical conversations (the French girl speaking English in a beautiful, broken, menacing way that suggested she knew English better than she was leading on), conversations that inevitably turned into Production Code-era love-making scenes that were interrupted by machine-gun fire or the breaking of dawn. That’s when the flashbacks happened, for some reason, at dawn, as the factory engines began to ramp up for the day (it was a secret factory where bullets were manufactured for the French Resistance, although I can’t remember how the film conveyed this). In the first flashback, Total War switched suddenly to color, and it wasn’t a nostalgic flashback like you’d expect, but a bloody one that showed the slow, methodical slaughter of a pig by two men whose faces were obscured on a farm from what appeared to be the American pilot’s childhood memory, although why his dreams were presented in color in the film was never clear. (One suspected that the filmmakers were secret experimentalists or avant-gardists subverting the war-movie genre from within.)

Then the dream switched without warning to something very simple, so simple as to be terrifying. An open meadow bathed in orange sun, a blue sky, the meadow-grass and wildflowers moving in the wind, and a man on a black horse slowly crossing the meadow from screen left to right, the camera stationary. One thing that’s always bothered me about that scene: it was silent except for what appeared to be a gunshot. At least that’s what I remember from that night, watching the film that no one else wanted to see because it wasn’t by David Lynch. The gunshot. But no corresponding action in the scene. Neither the horse nor the horseman reacted to the sound, as if it was meant only for the audience, some sort of secret signal from the filmmakers to us.

After this, the film fell back into the expected patterns: the American pilot, on the mend, began to suspect with more confidence that the girl was a Nazi sympathizer; he lied and told her that he was Jewish in hopes of catching a reaction from her, and that his presence at the farm endangered her family; the girl went out for a walk in the woods in the middle of night, unaware that the pilot watched her from the window of his room. Just then a shot rang out in the forest and, although the pilot’s first thought was that this was a trap, and that perhaps the girl had indeed seen him watching from the window, he pulled on his wool coat and dashed out into the cool night. For the next several minutes, the film went black. Instead of images, there was nothing except the sound of the pilot running blind through the night, his labored breathing, his footsteps across the field, the call of an owl. Twice the pilot called out the girl’s name breathlessly as he ran, until another shot rang out, and the moon cleared from behind the clouds. There at his feet was a young man in a torn soldier’s uniform that appeared to be German, although it as hard to tell in the dark, and the uniform from what I could tell wasn’t even World War II era. The soldier grasped his throat, obviously dying from gunshot wounds. The pilot leaned down to listen to the man’s dying words, in the moonlight.

“She can’t . . .” said the German soldier before breathing his last in a gurgling whisper. Before the meaning of this settled in, the screen grew brighter, in flickers, and the pilot look back over his shoulder to see—in a point-of-view shot—a fire in the distance. He took off running back to the farm, and within a few seconds it became clear that all was lost. By the time he arrived the farm house was engulfed in flames and the pilot fell to his knees and slumped forward. Then something very strange happened: the film switched to color again, but not because it was a dream or flashback. Bathed in the yellow light of the fire, the pilot remained hunched forward in sorrow and despair as a shadow—the shadow of a human being—emerged from frame right.

It was the girl, in color, wearing a bright red beret. For the first time you could see that her eyes were blue. She kneeled down beside the pilot and put her hand beneath his chin and gently lifted his face toward hers. By this time the color had become almost psychedelically saturated, with both the girl and the pilot bathed in the hellish, red light and black leaping shadows from the fire. The camera slowly panned down, revealing her clenched fist, which she slowly opened, palm up. In her hand she held a small, silver swastika, which gleamed in the light. It seemed to move imprecisely in the palm of her hand, as if animated. Then film switched again back to black and white, and the familiar Hollywood music began, signaling the end. The camera slowly panned back up to pilot’s face, which wore an expression of agony or ecstasy. After holding there for a moment, the camera continued panning up to the sky, revealing the moon, partially obscured by the black smoke from the smoldering farm house.

At the time, I thought the ending was clear: the girl had torn the swastika from the uniform of the German soldier she had shot in the woods. She was a double agent, working for the Resistance, and murdered the German before he had a chance to sneak into the farm house to murder the pilot. But later, as I thought more about the film (which I only watched that once) I wondered if the swastika might have been the girl’s confession, an affirmation of what the pilot had suspected: that she was a Nazi and worse yet, a Nazi out of choice, not coercion. There was also the fact of the burning farm house, which seemed to me symbolic of the irrational terror of total war. But back then we found symbols in everything. Afterwards, I tried to explain the film to my friends, but the more I talked about it the more confused it became in my mind. I’ve never really searched for the film. I have no desire to see it again. In a way, it was the most horrifying film I’ve ever watched, and I watched it alone.

Related Posts:

• Best Director Boys Club
• David Lynch Interview
• Cinema’s Occupy Zeitgeist
• Following The Rules
• “Russian Doll” Cinema

When we were in the mountains
We straddled a big fallen tree
I was so happy

I love these words! The poems sit sparse on the page, progressing as a tight narrative. I put Ms. Reyes in my cannon of love/lust poets like Deborah Landau and The Last Usable Hour, with her sexy wanderings through the city late at night, and Sandra Cisneros, whose Loose Woman makes me cry out for someone to spoon and swoon with.

Coeur De Lion’s beauty is in its sparse and tight language. There are few twists or clever turns of phrases, each line is hard flesh exposed for all its veins and glory. It’s in your mouth, and you will be satisfied with the finish:

My heart was beating
We went into the stall
And you slammed me against the wall
And everything was possible

The narrator and her lover/comrade are both writers. We live through their passion, their triangles and the circles of their small, close-knit literary worlds. Their story begins with holding hands in class and ends with borrowed books. It travels from the classroom to hotel rooms, and sadly, online, where words eventually kill the lovers.

The morning after
I definitively ruined
Our relationship
You wrote to me…

Fuck
You Ariana! For making believe,
For being too proud. For reading
Too deeply into words, so much
So that their meaning forms
Into nothing but your insecurities.

I feel the need to confess that I absolutely ruined a relationship in this very same manner. As a poet I read way too much into words, and my insecurities, while maybe not so visible on the surface, burn and rage down deep in me. I was with Ariana and her lover from the beginning to end. After the first reading of Coeur de Lion I opened a bottle of tequila and did shots in honor of Ariana Reines and the powerful magnetic pull of her naked pages filled with sex and bravery.

Related Posts:

• Leanna Moxley: The Last Book (of Poetry) I Loved, The Cow
• Michael Moats: The Last Book I Loved, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men
• Christine Gosnay: The Last Book I Loved, Hygiene and the Assassin
• Sean Carman: The Last Book I Loved, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
• Jenna Le: The Last Book I Loved, The Handmaid’s Tale

I’d like to cap this pen, lock the drawers,
and take my coat off the chair. I’d stop
the clocks at half-past two, then grab my keys
and drive away—no notes, no calls, the lights
still blazing from every room. I’d start no cults,
I’m sure. There’d be no acolytes who swear
they’d seen me drinking beer in Mexico,
no sunburnt tourists saying Yes! I saw him
at a truckstop in Des Moines. I’d just be gone,
like stars swallowed by the mackerel-light of dawn.

-Rob Griffith

Read the Rumpus Review of Rob Griffith’s The Moon From Every Window.

Related Posts:

• A Halfway House Where No One Leaves
• “Googlism for Steve,” a Rumpus Original Poem by Neil de la Flor
• They Sing Wild Songs In New Keys
• Ode to an Era of Polish Poetry
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Announces…

We sent this week’s Letter In The Mail pre-sorted, which takes longer than a normal stamp. Your letter, featuring an amazing cartoon by Dean Haspeil, should arrive on Friday or early next week. For people who subscribed late, or were lost in the transition from block addresses to CSV (never mind) I had to hand stuff and stamp the envelopes, which I mailed yesterday. The upshot is 100 subscribers will receive the letter about a week earlier than the rest of the subscribers.

Anyway, we’re excited about Dean’s letter. It’s our first cartoon letter. And it’s good.

Our next letter is from Lorelei Lee. Lorelei is an adult film star, a writer, and lecturer at NYU. She is also the co-writer of my movie Cherry, which is premiering in a little over a week in Berlin (come say hi). Her letter was written by hand and is fifteen pages long. You need to subscribe this week in order to receive Lorelei’s letter. There’s a preview of Lorelei’s letter in the NYTimes ArtBeat.

Coming soon we have Dave Eggers, Emily Gould, Matthew Zapruder, and others.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing the Super Bowl.

Yesterday was the Super Bowl – the last game of the football season. Unlike other bowls, this one is made “super” by musicians who interrupt the game to sing songs and dance around. This is referred to as the halftime show. Not only does the singing and dancing give the players a chance to take a break, but it gives the fans a chance to watch a Madonna video, which they were probably just hoping to do anyway.

The most significant part of the Super Bowl is that whichever team wins will be crowned the Champions of Football! Until next year when someone else becomes the champions.

Attending in person is an exclusive event limited to only tens of thousands of people. The cost of the average ticket is enough to provide food to a starving family for a month or more. I sure hope the people who spend their money on Super Bowl tickets don’t ever discover that the game is televised for free. I watched it from the comfort of my own living room and I was still able to paint my face and torso. (I didn’t know who was playing, so I just painted a beautiful landscape on myself. I should have waited for it to dry because now there’s a smudged landscape on my couch.)

The winners of the game are awarded a decent enough sized trophy in the shape of a football. It may not be the most creative design, but there’s no questioning what sport it represents. It’s unclear who gets to keep possession of the trophy. It may be that the manager keeps the trophy, or that the most popular player gets to. Another theory is that the trophy is cut up into small chunks of varying sizes and divided up between the team, with a correlation between chunk size and skill level of each player.

The best thing about the Super Bowl is the intensity with which the players run around while carrying the ball. I think they save up during regular football season so that when the Super Bowl comes they can really give it their all. You could really tell that each team really wanted to win. They were trying so hard! One team didn’t try hard enough though. That’s the downside of the Super Bowl. Even though there are some winners, there are also some losers. That’s why I turn the game off right before it’s over. I don’t want to have to imagine those losers going back to their mansions and having to tell their wives and/or girlfriends that they didn’t win the football game.

Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing slavery.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

We are thrilled to announce that March’s Rumpus Book Club selection is Sugar’s book! Once Sugar comes out we can reveal more details. Until then, get excited. And make the necessary arrangements to partake in our own Sugar-filled March madness by joining The Rumpus Book Club now!

Related Posts:

• DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #96: The Dark Cocoon
• Lessons Not Learned
• Sugar’s Coming Out Party!
• “Hit the Iron Bell Like It’s Dinnertime”
• Getting to Know Sugar

The Bat Segundo Show: now with Deborah Scroggins and upcoming with Stewart O’Nan.

Other People with Brad Listi: always good but running on an especially killer streak with new episodes featuring Caroline Leavitt, Vanessa Veselka, Alan Heathcock, Claire Bidwell Smith and Tayari Jones.

Tyson Cornell, a man with his hand in pretty much every aspect of book culture, runs broadcasts through Rare Bird Lit and takes callers.

My Chicago homie, author Ben Tanzer, runs This Podcast Will Change Your Life, and isn’t above interviewing you while drunk under the el tracks.  (Or I wasn’t above being interviewed drunk under some el tracks, is what I’m saying.)

Sunday Rumpus alums celebrate books now officially on sale:

Stacy Bierlein’s A Vacation on the Island of Ex-Boyfriends is now available for pre-order on Amazon and the indies.

Claire Bidwell Smith celebrated her official release date for The Rules of Inheritance.  Claire is smoking hot right now, people.  It’s pretty awesome.

And Miscellaneous:

Franzen comes out in favor of paper books.  Me, I’m more sympathetic to his views than I care to admit, even though they’re unrealistic and, as Quenby Moore points out, he’ll probably cash those e-book checks.

My first novel dropped just a week before I gave birth to my son—here, that old metaphor of book-and-baby as “twins” is explored further on The Millions.

The lovely Elissa Schappell shared this on FB; I’d never heard it and am not sure how I’ve previously lived.  Plath reads “Lady Lazarus.”  Chilling-gorgeous.

The first time I published Dan Chaon in Other Voices magazine, I thought, This fucking guy is gonna be a rock star.  I love being right.  Here, Dan elevates the WSJ.

Related Posts:

• No related posts…

February’s book is D. A. Powell’s Useless Landscape. Those are in the mail and we’ll start talking about them soon. Look for my essay on why I chose this book later this week. March’s book will be Linda Hogan’s Indios, and Camille Dungy will be leading that discussion.

Finally, this really isn’t book club news, but what the hell. The Rumpus is holding a fundraiser at the AWP convention, so if you’re going to be in Chicago on March 1, come by 826 Chicago. Readers include Nick Flynn, Cheryl Strayed, Peter Orner, Sommer Browning, Brian Spears and Stephen Elliott.

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Amy Newman
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with T. R. Hummer
• Why I Chose Amy Newman’s Dear Editor for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan
• Why I Chose T. R. Hummer’s Ephemeron for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club