Richard Nash recently gave this talk at an event for Grub Street.  If you haven’t heard Richard wax on publishing in general, and his latest venture, Small Demons, in particular, you should check it out.  Small Demons is a pretty phenomenal concept.  I’m still trying to figure out how Richard’s publishing community, Red Lemonade, functions precisely . . . it’s sort of Fictionaut-meets-indie-press-meets-a-dating-site, maybe?  But their books are great.  That’s the thing about Richard: you don’t get to become a mover and a shaker by putting out a crap product.

Richard’s in that rare category of people in publishing who are both arbiters of taste and a kind of “brand” in and of themselves.  Some other people like that are Lauren Cerand and Jessa Crispin.  That doesn’t grow on trees.  I’m not talking about the Jonathan Galassi or Nan Talese kind of mover-and-shaker: the establishment kind, with a financial engine, even though actually, in both of those cases, I’m fond of the particular aesthetic involved.  I’m talking about the quirky lone wolf types, who forge ahead with a kind of force of personality, and usually an absence of any serious money.  It’s worth watching people like this, and seeing what they’re doing next.

Everyone wants to brand themselves these days.  The writer can feel like the product, instead of the product being the book.  Never mind the book as Art–if your book is even the product at all you may be ahead of the game in contemporary publishing.

Erika Rae is rebranding the fallen Evangelical, over at her multimedia website.  Erika looks fetching in thigh-highs.  She’s terminally adorable, but don’t let it fool you–she bites.  Her memoir, Devangelical, is coming out from Emergency Press.  We’ll be running a bit here, sometime before it drops.  Here, she interviews author Frank Schaeffer on a number of juicily maddening topics, including Pat Robertson on masturbation.

Meanwhile, TNB Books’ latest, The Beautiful Anthology, may be aiming at nothing short of rebranding Beauty.  The editor, Elizabeth Collins, is stirring up some mischief.  I’ve got a story in this bad-ass thing.  The same story featured in my book trailer for Slut Lullabies.  It may be my favorite of my stories, actually.  It’s also the one that’s gotten me, far and away, in the most trouble with my friends.

I maybe needed a rebranding of my own after that story.  I’d based things on friends, yet because it was fiction it was particularly problematic because if you knew my friends you could easily tell who was who, but at the same time everyone was slightly–or sometimes extremely–more fucked up in the story than in Real Life.  But how was anyone supposed to tell what was fact vs. fiction?  The people I’d based things on thought I’d made them look bad.  Not using their real names wasn’t much consolation.  Autobiographical fiction is like that.  People end up, usually, looking more compromised than they would in a straight out essay that told all their actual secrets.  Some of the secrets you imagine for them, in fiction, may be emotionally true and yet somehow “worse” than the actual truth.  I wrote in the Acknowledgments section of Slut Lullabies that writers are gossips, liars and thieves; I thanked my friends in advance for putting up with me and loving me anyway, and in the end they all did.  I’ve been lucky that way.  The angriest anyone’s ever been at me for my writing was my mother-in-law, who didn’t speak to me for six months after my debut novel because she concluded I was a deviant pervert.  None of that novel was based on her–it was based on a Freud case study; it was supposed to be securely behind the veil of fiction and therefore “safe.”  But of course writing is always risky.  There are a lot of potential mistakes to make as a writer, but not shying away from risk seems the bare minimum of what you need to do right.

This overuse of the word “brand” in this Round-up is making me laugh.

You’ve gotta love Dan Wickett, over at Dzanc Books.  You will never, as long as you live, hear Dan use the word brand.  Here’s Dan selflessly championing other writers and celebrating Short Story Month, as he’s done for as long as I’ve been in this business.  And here’s Dzanc going all Kickstarter, to raise money for their rEprint series–they overshot their goal, and now will help hundreds more writers get their words out there in the ethersphere.  If people in publishing rode white horses, Dan would have one.  It’d probably be wearing a baseball cap and somehow it’d need a shave, but still.

If you’d like to spend some of your Sunday sobbing in a puddle on your floor, watch this.  Weirdly, unlike most things that make you sob on the floor, your day will be better for it afterwards.

Finally, my interview with the luminous Cheryl Strayed, aka “Sugar,” is up at Bookslut!

Very fine piece too, this same issue of Bookslut, on Susan Sontag.

The latest installment of Literary Disco, the incorrigible Tod Goldberg’s latest three-way endeavor, is on the loose.

There are all kinds of reasons Mother’s Day can be loaded.  Dead mothers.  Bad mothers.  Here’s another: the way the larger world resists accepting that some women simply don’t want or choose to become mothers.  This piece on CNN.com seems to be striking a resonant note among a lot of women out there.

Is your grandfather or weird aunt having an attack of nostalgia for traditional marriage this week?  You may want to be the annoying lefty relative that sends this link from Upworthy, humorously exploring what that phrase even means in the Bible.

Here’s something interesting: Bosnian-turned-Chicagoan, Aleksander Hemon, has been writer-in-residence over at the United Nations.

One of the coolest movers-and-shakers I know, Jennifer Nix, has a piece on finding meaning and reclaiming herself in poetry, after receiving a kidney transplant.  This is a must-read, people.

Gary Percesepe interviews Jurgen Fauth, co-founder of Fictionaut, about his debut novel, Kino.

My once-and-future boss, Patty McNair, revisits a cool in-depth conversation I was honored to be a part of, among a group of international writers on her blog, in celebration of Short Story Month.

Next time you see Davis Schneiderman traipsing around AWP in an all-white Gimp outfit, reading aloud from a blank book, or putting old copies of the classics through a dunk tank, you’ll also know his secret tender underside . . . here he is on HuffPo, honoring his mother and his wife for Mother’s Day so sweetly that I dare you not to say “Awww.”

Today’s fine Sunday Rumpus poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum, also debuted her fiction just last week.  This excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Hausfrau, is sexily subversive and left me wanting more.

In the kind of defeated sigh about the future of books that is increasingly commonplace, Sarah Weinman, the news editor at Publisher’s Marketplace, argues that in the digital age there’s no room for “serious nonfiction.” The gist of her argument is familiar, the kind of thing we’ve been hearing for years: without “traditional” publishers there will be no large book advances for what she calls “prestige” work, like Robert Caro’s multi-volume LBJ biography.

Her argument might have been a little more persuasive had she considered the fact that Caro actually went broke writing the first of his biographies, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. Caro had to sell his house, and take a job teaching, to support himself and his family in the seven years it took him to finish the book. Plus: his wife worked. When I saw Caro speak at an event in Tribeca, recently, he was asked what kind of advice he’d give to aspiring biographers. “Become independently wealthy,” he said.  And that’s from one of the biggest names in the “serious” business, who grew up as a writer in publishing’s alleged golden years.

It’ll always cost a writer more to do serious work of any kind than it will to just dash off some crap-on-delivery thing. And that goes for fiction, too. And it is, much of the time, thankless, as far as the rest of the world is concerned. That’s just how writing like a motherfucker goes.

…more

Greg Olear is smart and relentless in this exploratory expose on the aftermath of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished.”

What do you think of the positioning of “Toni Morrison” for posterity?

Patrick Somerville makes the coolest book trailer ever.

Roy Kesey, Anne Leigh Parrish, Steve Almond and others snag IPPYs.

If you’re in indie lit, Matt Bell has done you a favor at some point, and perhaps knows something embarrassing about you.  Here he is on Brad Listi’s smoking hot podcast, Other People.

Novelist Lydia Netzer blogs advice on How to Stay Married for 15 Years, over at HuffPo.  Um, hint: “get really good at sex.”

Diana Abu-Jaber on adventurous travels with a toddler in the WSJ.

The sixteen best writing schools in the country?

The nice guy with the most complicated name in publishing does the TNB Self-Interview.

Killer poet, Jill Alexander Essbaum, makes her fiction debut.

Famous female literary muses Zelda Fitzgerald, Louise Joyce, and Vivienne Eliot were more than just the apple of their respective husbands’ and fathers’ eye. It turns out they were also hard party-ers of the Jazz Age.

“The muse is traditionally a silent, passive figure; a beautiful woman whose beauty alone is enough to inspire artists” writes muse-scholar Lesley McDowell. These women didn’t fit that mold, each taking steps towards establishing their own fame in writing, dancing, and whimsical flapperdom.

A week ago, I was at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books.  Here in Chicago, everyone keeps asking me if I saw any “movie people.”  But I wouldn’t know movie people if I saw them, so my experience of the FOB was that everyone there was a literary fiction writer.  I suppose if I had analyzed it heavily enough, it might have seemed weird to me that there were so many literary fiction writers in Los Angeles at this one fest.  I guess I might have wondered what Florence Henderson was doing in the Green Room, under that limited definition.  Well, actually, I still don’t know what Florence Henderson was doing in the Green Room.  I didn’t see her–people kept saying she was there and pointing in a direction, but I don’t wear my glasses except to drive so really she could have been anyone.

My grad school buddy, Alex Shakar, won the LA Times Book Prize.  He shared this honor with Stephen King.  That part seems weird to me, but okay.  He won for his novel, Luminarium, which was published by Soho after a shitload of majors rejected it.  Luminarium‘s rave reviews and recent win is a pretty cool success story–it’s the kind of thing that’s inspirational to other writers. Alex spent a decade working on this novel.  He went from one agent to another agent and back to the first agent again.  He revised like a motherfucker.  He changed the entire novel from third person to first person.  He added a twin brother.  He was not afraid to shift some serious gears.  He wasn’t in a hurry, even though his university was apparently making noise about whether or not he’d get tenure, and maybe that was because he hadn’t had a book out in so long.  He didn’t pull the novel when houses like HarperCollins didn’t bite.  His agent didn’t drop him.  They took it to an indie; they focused on the book instead of the advance or the hype.  Most stories like this don’t end like Alex’s, but the ones that do are nice.  Alex has been lucky before–his debut novel, The Savage Girl, fetched a kind of obscene advance–and not all writers have that kind of luck.  But sometimes “luck” is just a euphemism for dedication and a crazy amount of talent, and in this case, I think that’s probably true.

Stephen eloquently states that talent is a myth.  He’s a better person than I; this is a nicer world view.  And he always says things in a way that makes me believe them in the moment.  But at the end of the day, I’m not sure I’m with him on this one.

Luminarium focuses on, among other things, the way spiritual experiences can be simulated and constructed–the way religious ecstacy is really just a brain state.  The more we learn about spiritual states, the less I trust them, even though I’ve had some intense ones in my life.  Recently, my husband sent me this article, about the way analytical thought reduces religious faith, which seems obvious to those of us without religious faith, but not at all obvious to the faithful, so people do . . . studies.  In my experience, this article reflects an essential truth, but that truth is kind of a shame.  I’d like a helmet like the one Fred wears in Luminarium; I’d like to be able to have ecstatic states and feel god whenever I wanted to.  Or maybe I wouldn’t really.  Love serves pretty much the same purpose, doesn’t it?  Love here in our concrete world, I mean; we don’t need to go looking anywhere else.  If you never feel ecstacy, it’s maybe a life issue, not a spiritual one.

I judged the ACM Nick Adams Short Story Contest, and this piece, by Clare Boerighter, was the clear winner.

Zoe Zolbrod, who wrote today’s Sunday essay on “The Last City I Loved,” also has a great piece over at The Nervous Breakdown, taking Katie Roiphe to task about her latest shock jock comments re: that S/M book phenomenon, Fifty Shades of Gray, which only one person I know has read, but all the magazines tell us is the most popular thing ever.  Zoe’s made a cool niche over at TNB writing about gender issues in a way that embraces ambiguity and sexiness.  She never stays on the surface of things.  She doesn’t just say “this is why Katie Roiphe is an idiot” and leave it at talking about why someone else is wrong.  Which is probably what distinguishes her from people like Roiphe, actually.  She’s more concerned with having ideas than with tearing other people’s ideas down.

Zoe had a success story with her novel, Currency, too, which, like Luminarium, also spent more than a decade finding a home.  She’s also talented and smart and tenacious.  Her book ended up with my small boutique indie, Other Voices Books, and it made some fun online “best of” lists, and we had a blast on the book tour marveling at how you can still buy cigarettes at restaurants in Austin.  Of course it didn’t make a bunch of money or win high profile prizes; most books don’t.  You can’t compare one book to another, anyway, because each is its own universe.  Still, even if you believe in talent, the outcomes won’t be linear or neat.  I do think if you’re good and dogged, someone will publish you eventually (especially in today’s lit landscape), and that the people who actually read your book will connect to it and like it, or at least a lot of them will.  How many people will read your book, however–and how much power those people have to make good things happen for you–well, maybe that’s more where the “luck” comes in.

My six-year-old son is obsessed with the Titanic.  I thought he was just quirky, but the New Yorker posits this as an archetype of human obsession.

I interview Charles Blackstone, Managing Editor of Bookslut and one of the nicest guys in publishing, at The Nervous Breakdown.

The Huffington Post is generally far too slick for my tastes, and so is this piece on the Ten Awful Truths (and their inverse good points) of Publishing, but you know what, there are still pretty core kernels of truth here worth reading.  What do you think?

Too many people who want to “be writers” aren’t really aware of any truths of publishing at all.  They think publishing is an ivory tower and that editors are sitting around in fancy offices taking fiendish pleasure in rejecting them and then going out for lunch with Jonathan Franzen at some private club.  The number of editors who have that kind of life is so few it barely merits discussion–and any editor who has attained that kind of power probably contributed some pretty phenomenal things to literary culture along the way, and helped a lot of writers make a name, and isn’t exactly an ambulance chasing scumbag anyway, so probably that person is the wrong target.  Some agents have fancy offices, but the first agent I ever visited in New York was working out of what looked like a badly furnished apartment with most of the furniture moved out.  I had an agent for awhile at Trident Media, and she was a reliable and wise woman, but when I went to visit I felt like I was in a scene from The Devil Wears Prada, with assistants running around slick waiting areas with designer sofas, and when I actually got ushered into her office I felt like I was on the clock, and I knew right then that eventually I would move on, because really that’s not a vibe most writers can relate to, I think.  There’s a place for that kind of vibe, but for most of us it’s not here.

Yesterday I turned down a 20K writer-in-residency gig where I would have had to teach one class in the fall and one in the spring, and do a couple of readings.  20K doesn’t sound like much money to everyone, but when you teach adjunct you’d usually have to teach four classes to make that much.  It was a good offer.  I was happy to get it.  I turned it down because I don’t have time.  I work too many jobs that don’t pay me anything at all, including this one.  What I’m saying here is that I’m incredibly lucky.  If you can turn down a paying gig so you can work for free doing something you like more, you’re luckier than almost anyone.  I get to work in my pajamas.  My daily life isn’t particularly glamorous.  When I stop writing this, I’m going to go vacuum crumbs out from under my couch cushions, because Stacy Bierlein is coming over and she’s a very neat girl, so I don’t want her to be afraid to sit on my cheap Ikea sofa.  Someday I’ll make it out to New York to visit my current agent, who I love.  She may have a fancy office, and she may not, but either way I trust she’ll just take me out and get me drunk, and we’ll laugh a lot.  We laugh a lot on the phone.  If you’re going to have an agent, which inherently makes a person feel a little bit like a prat anyway, you should have an agent who makes you laugh.  If s/he actually sells your damn book, like mine did last summer, that sure as hell helps too.

I link Roxane Gay almost every week.  Roxanne doesn’t miss a trick.  But she’s different here than usual.  She’s more personal and more raw.  You don’t have to care about The Hunger Games to read this.  Don’t be fooled by the beginning.  By the end you won’t be able to breathe.

I started out saying I wouldn’t link things in-house, to other Rumpus essays.  But the thing is, The Rumpus is publishing some of the best things out there.  That’s why I’m turning down writer-in-residencies to sit here in my pajamas.

It’s interesting the way The Hunger Games is resonating with women who have histories of extreme trauma.  Laura Bogart wrote about this too.  I’ve read the book now, even though I said I wasn’t going to.  I read it so my daughters wouldn’t think I was a snob.  But probably I am a snob when it comes to books.  And probably they already know that.  I enjoyed The Hunger Games more than I thought I would, though; it’s good for what it is.  I don’t feel about it the way Roxanne and Laura do, or exactly the way my friend Tod Goldberg, who is smart as hell, does either.  But I feel like anything that inspires women like Roxanne and Laura to write pieces like these has more merit than maybe I can see on the pages of the book itself.

Meredith Resnick is still interviewing contributors to Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience about how to get unstuck. Here is Kristin Thiel.

Welcome to Alison Espach and Judy Bolton-Fasman, both of whom are popping their Rumpus cherries today.

Next week I’ll be at the LA Times Festival of Books.  I won’t be in my pajamas.  I’ll be passing out Rumpus postcards and going to parties.  When I come home, there will be extra crumbs to vacuum out from under my couch cushions, but Stacy will be back in California so maybe I just won’t bother.

So last week I talked about the very cool Chiasmus Media looking for a new co-honcho.  This week, The Sun is looking for a Managing Editor.  And this gig, no joke, actually pays!

Continuing the coverage of Men Undressed contributors over at The Writer’s [Inner] Journey, the always-honest-and-insightful Rumpus fave, Steve Almond, talks about overcoming inhibitions.

And Steve, along with newcomers like Eugene Cross and veterans like Etgar Keret, was just included on the Frank O’Connor Internations Short Story Award longlist.

In the “What’s Not Fun About That?” category, did you see Adam Levin talking with porn star Kayden Kross over at McSweeny’s?

The new issue of Bookslut is out.  There’s always too much to link there to link any one thing without feeling like great things have been left out.  Try this and this.  They gave Stacy Bierlein, today’s Sunday Rumpus interviewer, some good love, too.

Roxane Gay‘s new Rumpus essay, “Beyond the Measure of Men,” discusses Meg Wolitzer’s recent NYTimes piece, “The Second Shelf.”  But really what Roxane is talking about is action.  If you want gender disparity to stop being an issue in literary culture, then publish more women.  This seems pretty reasonable.  It wouldn’t seem reasonable if women were genuinely not writing work as good as their male counterparts . . . but does anyone, other than V.S. Naipaul, really believe that?  The issue isn’t even one of the “women’s fiction” category, whatever one feels about that term.  Among writers of indisputably “literary” fiction, there still seem as many women as men crafting and submitting work.  I’ve been an editor for almost 20 years, in print and online forums, and to argue some gargantuan ratio imbalance seems silly.  Recently, a writer I like approached me with an anthology idea.  His idea was to publish risk-taking women writers, to “show” people that women are putting out brave literary work.  But almost every writer on his list already had a following–their existence wasn’t “news.”  Anthologies with this angle have been coming out since the 1970s.  Their audience just wasn’t the kind of mainstream/corporate corner of publishing that confers honor on men like Franzen or Eugenides.  Other Voices Books publishing another anthology wasn’t going to change that–we were just going to be preaching to a choir.  When do we stop feeling we need to “prove” this basic fact that women are producing literature, and just start acting on it as part of everyday life?  There’s a lot of complexity here.  Some people feel like if they don’t need to prove anything, they can just disengage.  That issue extends beyond literature.  How many writers of each gender get published in the New Yorker maybe isn’t really something that should keep us up at night.  Maybe that’s a high class problem to have.  But disparity has echoes everywhere.  Which voices are considered universal vs. exotic/Other/specialized is a wider a topic than who’s getting a fancy prize and who isn’t.  I get tired of this “women’s fiction” and VIDA statistics debate, too.  I just want to write and not be accountable for or to an entire gender or industry.  But throwing up our hands and walking away isn’t the answer.  Of course no one is accountable for all writing by women or for the sweeping marketing ploys of Big Publishing.  Still, literature is a dialogue that spans both directions of history, and artists engage in eternal conversation.  In that conversation, we’re all accountable for and to ourselves.

Today, Josip Novakovich is interviewed.  You may remember Josip’s Sunday essay on Friendship Addiction.

Sometimes, there’s so much cool stuff happening close to home, that a girl has to give in to Rumpus self-referentiality:

1) This has been Cheryl Strayed week, pretty much.  If you’ve been down with dysentary since before Valentine’s Day, you may not have heard that Cheryl is Dear Sugar.  You can read every single thing your heart desires about that freaking awesome news, here.

Cheryl’s memoir, Wild, scared the hell out of me.  In it, a much-younger-and-more-fucked-up Cheryl hikes the PCT solo.  If you’re like me, and would have been the first member of the Donner party the others sacrificed because of your wilderness uselessness, you will read this book on the edge of your seat.  You may emerge thinking Cheryl is a little bit crazy, even.  Which is, of course, where she gets the immense, bottomless heart necessary for a gig like Sugar.

Cheryl and I have had a few interesting exchanges about the fact that Sugar is “nicer” than Cheryl is.  I’ve been a fan of Sugar’s for a long time, predating knowing her true identity, but my favorite thing lately has been Cheryl’s self-awareness about the differences between a created persona and a real self, and her ability to maintain these differences while being consistent and authentic in both spaces.  Sugar wouldn’t have such a following if she were inconsistent–if she weren’t very much a Real Person.  And yet, Sugar isn’t “Cheryl,” precisely. It’s cool.

Cheryl and I talk about this and a bunch of other stuff in an upcoming Bookslut interview–I’ll keep you posted.

2) The first Sugar–who turns out to be Steve Almond–also continues to rock it in these parts with his new, hybrid fiction/historical essay column.  Steve is required reading for humanity.  That’s my final word on the matter.

3) Rumpus editor, Roxane Gay, also knocked it out of the park yet again this week.  Nothing slips by Roxane.  (Me, on the other hand: I didn’t even know who Chris Brown was when I first read this.)  But the thing is, you don’t have to know jack about Chris Brown, or keep up with music celebs for this piece to be pertinent.  The glorification of violence is everywhere in our culture, of course.  It’s not just in the way dating/domestic abuse is romanticized, or in young girls’ hunger for any form of attention, or the way “famous” can get away with anything . . . Roxane calls us all out, in a good way, to pay more attention.

Happy Sunday.

It’s a pretty fine time for galleys.

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?

If you’re not listening to literary podcasts, you’re missing out.  Some recent highlights:

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.

Tin House writer and core faculty over at Tod Goldberg’s fab UC Riverside low residency MFA program, Mary Otis, has a line from her story animated over at Electric Literature.  These are pretty cool.

Are others out there old enough to remember Katie Roiphe’s annoying piece in Harper’s, “Making the Incest Scene,” back in 1995?  I generally consider Roiphe a shock jock.  But here she defends John Updike’s allegedly maligned literary honor, and makes some fine points.

Congrats to new Rumpus essays editor, Roxane Gay!  Here’s Roxane on running a micropress.

Roxane is fun to follow on Twitter.  Stuff pisses her off.  Recently she was bugged by Caitlin Flanagan (another practitioner of If You Have A Vagina But Diss Women, You Increase Your Chances Of Being Published In Harper’s and The Atlantic). You may remember Flanagan’s oldie disparaging the modern wife for not putting out enough. Roxane said she didn’t have time to write an essay about more recent Flanagan pet-peeves, but if she did it would no doubt rock.

Since she doesn’t, here’s seriously snarky hilarity on all things Flanagan over at The Awl.

I don’t really understand Reddit culture.  And this isn’t “literary” either.  But something cool seems afoot.  Reddit raised a wild amount of money for a vandalized orphanage in Kenya, and it sparked a whole new subreddit branch of philanthropic outreach.  More than worth checking out.

Sometimes we have to toot or our horn, or rather Emily Rapp’s horn.  Emily’s gorgeous essay on last week’s Sunday Rumpus was syndicated at Longreads, where it became a top 5 read this week, and also by Canada’s biggest daily.  Nice freaking way to make an entrance, Em!

I’m excited about Josip Novakovitch’s new book of essays from Dzanc.

Josip is a blunt, subversive, funny writer, besides knowing how to kick the reader in the chest emotionally.  We at Other Voices Books have always nursed a little crush on him.  We’ll bring him over some Sunday and spread the love.

P.S. I’ve been getting pretty cool pitches for Sundays, people!  Exciting things coming from Zoe Zolbrod, Brad Listi, Julia Goldberg, Rob Roberge, Patrick Somerville and others . . . do you have a pitch?  I’m not that hard to find . . .

The fabulously smart Roxanne Gay, interviewed in the fabulously smart podcast series Other People with Brad Listi.

Read Emily Rapp’s essay on female friendship, solicited for The Sunday Rumpus because I am obsessed with her.  Once you’re obsessed too, find more here.

And related to the chick-power theme, if you want to get your depression on re: the flip side (i.e. modeling), check out this from the U.K.’s Daily Mail.

Then, in your Is There A Gender War confusion, check out Lisa Dremousis’ claim, “I’m Mad at You Because You’re an Idiot, Not Because I’m a Woman.”

As is sometimes the case at HuffPo, their selections are kinda lame re: this “Bad Boys of Literature” list, but nothing with Hanif Kureishi on it can be all bad.

Up next Sunday, “Ten Reasons Not to Sleep With a Poet,” from Stacy Bierlein’s debut collection.  Full of stunning, heart-stopping one-liners worthy of early Ann Beattie and Lorrie Moore, and sexy as hell.

Speaking of sex: Bierlein and I also co-edited the anthology Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience, in which contributors like Jennifer Egan, Susan Minot, Aimee Bender and Lidia Yuknavitch narratively cross-dress.

Have you already seen this psychotically charming, Burning Man rendition of Oh, The Places You’ll Go by Dr. Seuss?  For the love of all things fun, if not, check it out.

Why do you figure this near-dead Alexander Maksik sex scandal didn’t get as much press as Marie Calloway?  Though our author may be a bit of a wank, You Deserve Nothing was one of my favorite reads this year.

And kudos to Kate Zambreno, whose seethingly brilliant Green Girl is one of the only indie titles to make the Tournament of Books.

Today, in Book Review, Christopher Lura reviews Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, David Bellos’s new treatise on the pleasure of translation. Read the review.

Musician and philosopher David Rothenberg recently sat down for a public lecture with Laurie Anderson at the venerable Explorer’s Club in New York City.

In their conversation they discussed a wide variety of topics including the minutiae of the calls made by male humpback whale, whether or not music is a language and on exploring the edges of human culture through music. The entire proceedings have been preserved for posterity at Vimeo. If you want a diversion equal parts maritime and philosophy of culture, this hits the spot. (Video below.) …more

When Jay Reatard was alive, he got called anything from “possessed” to “total dick.”

Looking back on his recorded legacy with the ease awarded by hindsight, I see that he was consumed by his own aesthetic: a wild man with a vision. …more

The UK’s Guardian runs a Poem of the Week. This week it’s ‘My Grandmother’s Opal’ by Grevel Lindop.

The accompanying article is a thoughtful discussion of the piece and of poetry’s appropriateness as a “memorial genre.” Both poem and article are contemplative, made poignant by the memories of lost loved ones that the passing holiday season often evokes.