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

The LA Times‘ Jacket Copy on The Rumpus’s Letters In The Mail.

Thanks Jacket Copy. We love you back!

“I give as much atten­tion to a letter as I do to anything I write.” – William S. Burroughs. (via Jesus Angel Garcia)

Chantel Simmons is excited about her letter from Margaret Cho.

McSweeney’s interviews Diane Williams, author of this month’s Rumpus Book Club selection, Vicky Swanky Is a Beauty. Williams discusses the humor in her short story collection, being read to as a child, and contemporaries versus dead heroes.

“Elemental and timeless. You are very generous when you say this about my work. I can only pray it might sometimes be true. What are the features of such texts? Moral ambiguity? Complexity? Brave probes into the mysteries.”

February’s Rumpus Book Club selection is A Very Minor Prophet by James Bernard Frost. Warm up with this excerpt from Hawthorne Books, and if you’re not yet on-board, consider joining the Book Club to get an early look at the full novel.

“A Very Minor Prophet is the story of how Barth Flynn, a barista swimming upstream against purposelessness in Portland, Oregon, becomes the faithful scribe of Joseph Patrick Booker. Booker is a dwarf preacher who serves Voodoo donuts, Stumptown coffee, and, while his congregation throws PBR cans at him, rants about George W. Bush during the height of the 2004 presidential election.”

Book Riot on Letters In The Mail.

Rumpus Poetry Book Club advisory board member Gabrielle Calvocoressi on why she chose Aase Berg’s Transfer Fat to be the group’s January selection. …more

The first Letter In The Mail began arriving yesterday. We know because of twitter: Matthew Holt, Peter Knox,  Molly T, Jillian,  and Scott MacCaulay.

Sari got one with an illustration by Nic Rad.

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Amy Newman about her poetry collection Dear Editor. …more

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club discussion with Amy Newman, in its entirety: …more

“I got this urge to get back to sending paper letters, and I also knew a lot of authors who I knew would be really excited about it.”

The Today Show website gives some love to Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott’s latest artistic proposition, Letters in the Mail. (The article also warns its readers that some of our ads “feature colorful language that might raise a few eyebrows.” Well then, let’s hope they don’t click over to our Sex section.)

This week’s Letter In The Mail has been sent. Next week’s letter is being written by Margaret Cho!

(The Rumpus interview with Margaret Cho here)

You just texted me two cock pics
It used to be more artful
The way you did it, the composition.
Like last week. It just stopped raining.
I have a cold quicksilver feeling.
I could put this in a place where you could find it
But I am hiding it here.

One time
I wanted you to call me
So I held my blackberry to my forehead.

Why am I so stupid. Do you know why? World, …more

Saturday’s envelope stuffing party for Letters In The Mail, a slideshow after the jump:

…more

“Well, we’ve just started doing this. Only a couple of the letters are already written. I know Tao Lin is doing his by hand, and illustrating it. Then we’ll photocopy it and send. I think the authors are going to have a lot of fun with the form.”

AdAge talks to our own Stephen Elliott about the Rumpus’s new Letters in the Mail subscription.

The first Letter In The Mail is going out tomorrow. Written by Rumpus founding editor Stephen Elliott.

Next week’s letter is from Margaret Cho. Who doesn’t want a letter in the mail?

The Rumpus is finally starting a print subscription. We’d like to say this was the plan all along, but we’ve actually never had a plan. …more

Being a part of an online community comprised of people all around the world is a very odd feeling. You know the other members so well, yet not at all. …more

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club discussion with T. R. Hummer, in its entirety: …more

“Each of the Popper men is to a large degree confounded by love. The women they desire, invariably plucky and self-possessed, have to work to stave off being swallowed whole by their men. “Love and Shame and Love’’ offers no explanations for what so mysteriously arrives and sometimes disappears. “Why?’’ the Popper men want to know. Orner would suggest there is no why. He’s the rare sort of writer who not only exactingly paints life’s bewilderments and suffering, but induces the experience itself in the reading.”

Boston.com reviews November Rumpus Book Club pick, Love and Shame and Love by Peter Orner!

The Rumpus Book Club is proudly presenting Treasure Island!!!, Sara Levine’s debut novel as our December pick.

“The story of a ferocious obsession,” Treasure Island!!! chronicles a college graduate’s fateful reading of Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel “Treasure Island,” and the adventures that follow. The book has received enthusiastic endorsements from the likes of Alice Sebold, Aimee Bender, and former Rumpus Book Club author Adam Levin, who says, “Had Grace Paley spent her youth hanging out with Larry David, listening to the Ramones, and reading Stanley Elkin, she’d have probably written something like Treasure Island!!! It’s fast-paced and intimate, as warm at its center as its surface is mean, and funny, funny, funny. I love it. By the end of next week, I’ll have read it three times.”

You can read it three times by the end of the month if you get with the Rumpus Book Club. As a club member you can reap some awesome small-press literary benefits like these. For $25 a month, you get a book that has yet to be released—a book that comes with an online chat with the author and opportunities to review the book on the Rumpus.

The Rumpus Book Club discussion with Laurie Weeks, in its entirety: …more

The Rumpus Book Club talks with Laurie Weeks about Zipper Mouth, her road to The Feminist Press, and words that do backflips. …more

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club discussion with Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan, in its entirety:

…more

The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Claire Kageyama-Ramakrishnan about her poetry collection Bear, Diamonds and Crane. …more