Why I Chose Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
But grace is what I found in River Inside the River. Grace in abundance.
...more
Book Club Blog
What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update
Rumpus Book Club and Poetry Book Club members have one great advantage over readers everywhere else: you get to read new work before anyone else (except some reviewers) gets to. (You can join at any time.) You get to talk about those books with a host of online members all during the month (around 350 between the two clubs) and best of all, chat with the authors online at the end of the month.
...moreA Rumpus Book Club Update
Say you’re a person who needs good books to read, and say you like chatting with people about good books and say you’d like it if some people you trust recommended good books to you and say they’re recommending books before they’re even available in stores.
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Camille Guthrie
This is an edited transcript of the Poetry Book Club discussion with Camille Guthrie.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with Emily Rapp
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Emily Rapp about The Still Point of the Turning World, the universality of grief, constructing a memoir in real time, and divinity school smack talk.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with George Saunders
The Rumpus Book Club chats with George Saunders about Tenth of December, sudden celebrity, why escalation matters if you’re a writer, and how to stick with a story
...moreA Rumpus Book Clubs Update
The Book Clubs are rocking right now with this month’s selections, George Saunders’s Tenth of December and Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair, but there’s some great stuff on the horizon.
...more
Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
These poems are not traps, but safe spaces with doors inside them.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Conversation with Manuel Gonzales
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Manuel Gonzales about The Miniature Wife, subverting genre, building a believable fictional world, and the invention of paper towels.
...moreA Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update
Let’s say that some months we wind up with an extra copy or two of our Book Club or Poetry Book Club selections. And let’s also say that, after a while, those extra copies start to take up a little space.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Interviews T Cooper
The Rumpus Book Club chats with T Cooper about Real Man Adventures, meditations on masculinity, vintage-style book design, and why writing is really fucking hard.
...more
“Book of Dog” by Cleopatra Mathis
The domesticated dog, evolved 15,000 years ago from gray wolves, is not a reliquary of slavish dependence in Book of Dog, Cleopatra Mathis’ seventh collection, nor is it a token of the bourgeois middle-class’s presumed benignity. It is as necessary to world ecology as the mice, ants, and moths that populate the collection, and possessed of a “plain language” that challenges not only the echo chamber of rhetoric, but the very conceit (the restaging of the spatio-temporal order) of the lyric poem.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Jami Attenberg
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Jami Attenberg about The Middlesteins, the fair portrayal of an overweight protagonist, and food addiction in the face of an unforgiving culture.
...more
Why I Chose Cleopatra Mathis’s “Book of Dog” for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Camille T. Dungy on why she selected Book of Dog by Cleopatra Mathis for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club in November.
...moreA Brief History of The Rumpus Poetry Book Club
Back in July of 2010, The Rumpus started a poetry version of its book club. Board member Camille Dungy selected Shane Book’s Ceiling of Sticks to start us off and we’ve never looked back. Here’s a rundown of the book club for potential members–what you’ll get and what you would have gotten if you’d been with us from the beginning.
...morePraise for The Middlesteins
Our October Rumpus Book Club selection, Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins, has been receiving lots of accolades from the likes of O Magazine, The Buffalo News, and Grantland.
“…It’s clear-eyed funny and truthful and deeply moving, especially in the killer-punch of its ending.”
...moreA Brief History of the Rumpus Book Club
A Brief History of the Rumpus Book Club
The Rumpus Book Club kicked off on May 19, 2010, when Stephen decided to announce it in his Daily Rumpus in his own special way: “Today we’re launching The Rumpus Book Club! That’s a pretty quick turn around when you realize I just had this idea yesterday.
...moreThe Daily Beast Loves The Rumpus Book Club
And we love you back.
While I’m at it, a little update news. Our current book is Kathleen Alcott’s The Dangers of Proximal Alphabets–Bookslut covered it here and said “It’s never simple, but if complicated is what produces a novel like this one, we should be grateful for the messy, the broken, and the quiet graces they birth, the camaraderie that can find us in even the most isolating of nightmares.”
We’re very excited to announce that our October book is Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins.
...moreDavid S. Atkinson: A Rumpus Book Club Member Reviews We Only Know So Much
Elizabeth Crane’s We Only Know So Much focuses on the lives of a bunch of messed up people. Really messed up people, in fact. Okay, there’s a great deal more than that…but it’s a good spot to begin.
...moreA Rumpus Book Club Update
Rumpus Book Club members this month have been devouring Emma Straub’s Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and we’ll be chatting with Straub about her book this Wednesday night. Poetry Book Club members have been all over Mary Jo Bang’s new translation of Dante’s Inferno, and we’ll be chatting with her on Thursday.
...moreHappy Release Day!
If you’re a member of the Rumpus Poetry Book Club (and if you aren’t, here you go), then you should have received your copy of Leigh Stein’s Dispatch From the Future weeks ago. If, however, you are among the unfortunate people who had to actually wait for the book’s official release, then today is your day.
...more
Announcing Letters For Kids!
This Just In: Announcing Letters For Kids! Letters For Kids is just like Letters In The Mail, except intended for subscribers six and older. We’re helping people appreciate the post office at a younger age.
You’ll get two letters a month written by middle-grade authors like Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler, Adam Rex, Kerry Madden, Natalie Standiford, Susan Patron, Rebecca Stead, Cecil Castellucci, and more.
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Rowan Ricardo Phillips
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Rowan Ricardo Phillips about his poetry collection The Ground.
...more
The Poems That Let You In: A Special Rumpus Invitation
In honor of summer and poetic adventures The Rumpus Poetry Book Club is doing something special this evening. We’re opening tonight’s online Rumpus Poetry Book Club chat with Allan Peterson to everyone who’d like to come.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Deni Béchard
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Deni Béchard about his book Cures for Hunger, the complexities of memoir and fiction, and the difference between traditional French and Quebecois.
...moreRumpus Book Club(s) Announcements
The Rumpus Book Club has been having a great time with this month’s selection, Elizabeth Crane’s We Only Know So Much, and the Poetry Book Club has been taking Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts with them everywhere. But we’re nearly halfway through the month.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Emily St. John Mandel
The Rumpus Book Club talks with Emily St. John Mandel about The Lola Quartet, panthers in Florida, her writing process, and more.
...moreWhere Are You Reading?
The answer for me, in this case, is among a group of statues on the Drake University campus in Des Moines, IA. I’m reading from our June Poetry Book Club selection, Allan Peterson’s Fragile Acts. I’ve posted video of this act in our new Facebook group for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club.
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Carmen Giménez Smith
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Carmen Giménez Smith about her poetry collection Goodbye, Flicker.
...moreThe Next Letter In The Mail: Elisa Albert
The next Letter In The Mail, going out early next week, is from Elisa Albert.
Elisa Albert is the author of How This Night is Different (stories) and The Book of Dahlia (a novel). The New Yorker said she “writes with a pathos uniquely her own, all the more blistering for being slyly invoked.”
Her work has appeared in Tin House, FiveChapters, Lilith, Post Road, and a bunch of anthologies.
...more