Our April poet, Carmen Giménez Smith, was featured on NPR’s NewsPoet series. (NewsPoet has featured Rumpus Poetry Book Club poet and recent Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith as well.) Check it out.

And if you’d like to become a member of the Poetry Book Club–we’re talking about Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s collection The Ground right now–click here.

A month ago we announced Letters To Each Other, which allowed subscribers to Letters In The Mail to send a one page letter and SASE. …more

This week’s Letter In The Mail is from MariNaomi.

MariNaomi is the author of the Smoke In Your Eyes comic that appears monthly on The Rumpus. She is the author and illustrator of the graphic memoir Kiss & Tell: A Romantic Resume, Ages 0 to 22 (Harper Perennial, 2011).

Here’s her website. Here’s her most recent comic.

Her letter is awesome and unlike any letter we’ve sent before.

The next letter is being written by Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott. More information on Letters In The Mail here.

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Linda Hogan about her poetry collection Indios. …more

This month, the Rumpus Book Club has been reading the latest novel from Emily St. John Mandel, The Lola Quartet. Here’s some of what other people have been saying about the book.

Library Journal says of it “Evocative, intriguing, and complex, this novel is as smooth as the underbelly of a deadly, furtive reptile. Mandel’s substantial fan base will rejoice; word of mouth will bring new fans on board.”

IndieBound, which put last month’s book, Cheryl Strayed’s Wild on its Indie Next List, will put The Lola Quartet atop its May list.

Publisher’s Weekly interviewed Mandel here and reviewed it here, saying it “excels as a character study that considers the slow degradation of hopes, dreams, and expectations of people who are only in their late 20s but already feel ancient.”

And from last May, Emily St. John Mandel writes about bad reviews over at The Millions.

May’s book is about to go out too–it’s Cures for Hunger, a memoir by Deni Y. Béchard. If you’d like to join the Rumpus Book Club, click here.

The Rumpus Book Club talks with Cheryl Strayed about Wild, finding forgiveness through writing, Sugar, being photoshopped, and more. …more

This week’s Letter In The Mail is from Tao Lin.

Tao is the author of six books including the novel Richard Yates, the novella Shoplifting From American Apparel. He is the founder of the literary press Muumuu house. …more

When I saw the words “This week’s Letter In The Mail is from Sari Botton” at the bottom of Wednesday’s Daily Rumpus email from Stephen Elliott, my stomach dropped. …more

Dear Rumpus,

I went on a letter writing rampage yesterday and it’s all your fault. Thanks for that.

One of them was to Lorelei Lee about how I want to be a sex performer but I’m a wife and mother in the suburbs of Nashville so I’m settling for burlesque. I wondered if she remembered the names of the songs about prostitution that her grandmother used to sing. …more

This week’s Letter In The Mail is from Sari Botton.

Sari authors a column on The Rumpus called Conversations With Writers Braver Than Me and recently wrote an essay about her experiences as a ghostwriter. …more

A few people asked recently how many letters have gone out so far for Letters In The Mail. Here’s a list, but remember we send them pre-sorted, which the post office prefers. The result is they can take up to ten business days to arrive.

Aimee Bender — 3/28/12

Rick Moody — 3/20/12

Padma Viswanatahn — 3/12/12

Matthew Specktor — 3/2/12 …more

This week’s Letter In The Mail is by Aimee Bender. Her letter is written by hand and begins, Dear Reader, writing a letter is reminding me of other letters. …more

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with D.A. Powell about his poetry collection Useless Landscape, or A Guide For Boys. …more

Letter writing is one of those things said to fall under the rubric of “lost art.”  Like tango dancing or throwing a knuckleball, whatever semi-vanished pastime we’re getting sentimental about this week (a google search reveals reference to a “Lost Art of Blogging,” which means time’s really moving, isn’t it?), letter writing is rumored to have disappeared. …more

This week’s Letter In The Mail is from Rick Moody. Rick was actually the first columnist on The Rumpus. …more

Dean Haspiel was our fourth letter writer for Letters In The Mail, but his letter was different, it was a cartoon. And it elicited an interesting response which he has posted over at Trip City.

Rumpus Book Club member Kristy Elam shares an adorable ad for TRBC: …more

This week’s Letter In The Mail is from Padma Viswanathan. Her letter is written by hand (in cursive!) and begins, I’m sorry, I must start out by recounting a dream.

Padma’s website is here. She’s written for The Rumpus before here and here and actually a bunch of times.

Padma is the author of The Toss Of A Lemon, which India Today called “A brilliant tour de force” and Library Journal, in a starred review, called “Dazzling” and “an important  work of historical fiction.”

More about Letters In The Mail.

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Aase Berg and translator Johannes Göransson about the poetry collection Transfer Fat. We are also joined this month by Garth Graeper of Ugly Duckling Presse, who published Transfer Fat. …more

Today is the very last day to join The Rumpus Book Club if you’re hoping to receive Sugar/Cheryl Strayed’s book, Wild. Make your way over here to subscribe.

If you were referred by USA Today, and want more information on Letters In The Mail, click here. And thank you for stopping by; let’s have a relationship.

We had the idea for Letters In The Mail on January 2, 2012, and announced it on January 3. Since then we’ve sent out letters from these writers in this order: …more

I asked people in The Daily Rumpus email if they were subscribed to Letters In The Mail and what they had thought of the most recent letter from Lorelei Lee. Here are some of their responses.

…more

Author Sara Levine read a few chapters from her novel Treasure Island!!! (a Rumpus Book Club selection) at WORD bookstore in Brooklyn and said wonderfully interesting things during the Q & A with the audience:

On male plots v. female plots: …more

Rumpus Poetry Editor Brian Spears on why he selected D. A. Powell’s Useless Landscape or A Guide for Boys for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club in February. …more

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.

We are thrilled to announce that March’s Rumpus Book Club selection is Sugar’s book! …more

A lot, really. First of all, we’re about to chat with Aase Berg and Johannes Gorannson about Berg’s book Transfer Fat It’s the first time we’ve done a translation, and we’re very excited to be able to talk with both the poet and the translator. Look for the transcript later this month.

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.

Just an update that there was a problem with our subscriber service for Letters In The Mail this morning. If you signed up for letters on the first day (about 200 of you did) you received a note saying we had been unable to process your subscription. You probably got another note after that saying we had been able to process your subscription after all. There is nothing to worry about here. It was a glitch. We are now un-glitched.

Here’s a couple of pages from The Alcoholic, written by Jonathan Ames and drawn by Dean Haspiel. Our next Letter In The Mail is by Dean Haspiel and it’s in the form of a cartoon. …more