Will the ironies that plague the demise of print never end? …more

I am, like you, a rabid reader of good books.

There are times, though, when I am not so feral. Reading is mostly a bust. Books fail. They fail to pinch my nerve. …more

A long meditation on poetry, love, time, pain, and finishing the novel: …more

“Though I have doubted my talent, I’ve never doubted my conviction that this was the path I had to be on. Writing is like my Siamese twin: freakish, alive, weighty, uncanny. Were we to be separated, I doubt that I could survive it.” …more

Are there rules that govern the representation of the “real world” in fiction? How much should fiction writers be allowed to misrepresent history before being called out for it? …more

A review of David Goodwillie’s American Subversive that veers off into some really important and complicated and basically unanswerable questions about literature, literary reviews, overstimulation, secret weapons, and 21st century life. …more

A crop of young writers turns to mythic and fearsome creatures as a way of coping with the danger and unpredictability of the real world. …more

What makes a good title? What makes a bad one?

And how do you know when you’ve found the right one? …more

I’ve been trying to write a book review of Ron Currie’s Everything Matters! for the last few weeks. I’ve been trying and failing splendidly.

In fact, more than writing anything, I’ve been doing a sort of literary circuit training—pacing around my apartment and slugging absurd quantities of coffee and snarling to myself about slinging postmodern bullshit all over the page …more

The deciders of the Publishers Weekly Best 10 list “ignored gender and genre and who had the buzz.” Which is kind of brilliant in a way. Because everyone knows if you ignore things, you can maybe make those things go away. …more

A while back, a reader sent a lovely letter to my publisher. He enjoyed my novel, The Hakawati, tremendously, he wrote; however, he wanted to make sure that the writer, I in this case, knew that a story, one of the hundreds of stories in the book, was similar to one told in an episode of the old television series, The Twilight Zone. …more

If you suspect, perhaps from a particularly well-phrased passage in a cover letter, or a rhymed couplet tucked into a résumé, that you have a writer on your short-list, you can turn to Google for confirmation. Many writers in the workplace have published a poem, a story, or even a book—maybe two or even three books—but are still unable to earn a living from their writing. …more

Finishing a book is like ending a love affair; the longer it’s been a part of your life, the harder it is to close the covers and walk away. You regret the parts that you read too quickly. In your eagerness to tick off pages and find out what happened next you didn’t always appreciate the elegance of the prose. You envy the next reader, the one who gets to discover the book for the first time. …more

by Elizabeth Kadetsky

When I was in high school I, like many teens, believed myself to be a misfit, the only alienated person in the room. I found respite in Frank McCourt’s English classes at Stuyvesant High. …more

by Terese Svoboda

Nurse Ratched faced us—okay, let her remain nameless, this American CARE official with the power to educate the quarter million Somalian refugees trapped in Dadaab, the largest and oldest camp in the world. …more

by Joshua Mohr

Lately people have been asking me why I decided to publish my novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, with a small press. Instinctively, my gut wants to lie, stammer some kind of self-justification: “Well, uh, I felt that a boutique house (note that I didn’t say “small press”) would give me more attention (i.e. answer my emails) and nurture the book in a way true to my artistic vision (i.e. not perform fellatio on the marketing department)

…more

by Peter Selgin

Not long ago a writer friend emailed me in distress. She had gotten an Amazon customer review for her new novel, which I’d read in manuscript and admired. The one-star review panned the work as sentimental and derivative. What made the review so damning was that it was intelligent and well-written, therefore hard to dismiss. Worse, it was the only review she’d gotten so far. …more

by Rose Garrett

I recently read that revenge, in addition to sex and food, stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain, which explains why the settling of scores is often pursued with as much unbounded enthusiasm as philandering and doughnut holes. To that short list I would add book-reading, which might appear more high-minded than the rest, but which has revealed itself to me to be as base, vulgar, and fucking incredible as any of the seven sins. …more

The future of book reviewing is online.

I say this not as a cheerleader for all things hi-tech (hell, I don’t even own an iPod), nor as some prophet of the post-physical book, but because the model of book reviewing we’re used to – delivered by the priestly class of critics; limited by paper, ink, column inches; determined by the latest microtrend and by who an author’s agent had lunch with – is clearly history. …more

by Marianne Rogoff

We’re distracted, our attention is shot, we are under surveillance, and we don’t care! We like being linked and friended by strangers who may or may not be who they say they are. …more

We’d like to introduce you to The Blurb, the Rumpus Books blog. Check this space for frequent posts about the state of our writing culture, our literary community, and the writer’s life, written by authors, editors, writing teachers, and readers. If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, drop us an email at books@therumpus.net.

2008 was kind of a rough year for American publishers, culminating in the bloodbaths of November and December which saw hundreds of firings, major restructuring at Random House, and a crisis at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt which may yet prove fatal. Industry professionals are understandably looking for a silver bullet to reverse the trend: a new blockbuster from Dan Brown? A trilogy of teen sorcerer novels from Jhumpa Lahiri? Saddam Hussein’s memoir, written from beyond the grave? …more