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From Stephen Elliott
These poems are about unintentional association, the ways our minds wander even when — especially when? — they’re trying to wrap themselves around a given idea. …more
The early, formative period of rock and roll criticism produced three great and indelible voices, three voices that have gone on to influence every writer who has written about popular music in the years since. Those three voices belong to Richard Meltzer, Lester Bangs, and Greil Marcus. Bangs died young, and Marcus has drifted off into a phase where his muscles, at least to this reader, are more academic than hortatory. …more
Lawrence Weschler’s collection of essays, Uncanny Valley, compiles some his best essays with the same perspective that he brings to each essay – an impulse to find the subtle convergences in the mundane. …more
A few months ago my wife and I spent a day on Isla Colon—one of Panama’s Bocas del Toro islands in the Caribbean—where three different men asked if I wanted marijuana. When I told them no, they’d ask the obvious follow-up question: coke? …more

Wherever he went, the man of God carried his shotgun…
Christopher Goffard’s You Will See Fire is a tense and harrowing look at the life and mysterious death – of a brave, at times, recklessly so – American priest living and working in Kenya. …more
This is an intelligent and well-crafted poetry that demands multiple readings. And it is a voice–perhaps a bit apprehensive and damaged by experience–that seems willing to express it all, even the ugly and cruel. …more
Even after he published, Prufrock and The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot continued to work his day job at a bank. …more
Ann Beattie’s collagist new novel, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life, questions the inherent value of fiction. …more
Alex Gilvarry’s From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant (Viking) is an original, smart, and incisive novel about a Filipino fashion designer, Boyet Hernandez, who is held at Guantanamo Bay after authorities discover his ties to an alleged terrorist, Ahmed Quereshi, the man who funded Boyet’s fashion label. …more
These are poems that want to be breathless, that want to mirror the intensity of passion and desire and heartbreak, and leave the reader light-headed. …more
Goldbarth still infuses his poems with an old-fashioned, childlike wonder at the marvels of our world, along with a bemused chuckle at the ways in which we so obviously fall short of our lofty goals. …more
Will Boast’s debut story collection, Power Ballads, is tied together by a compelling and evolving drummer named Tim, who will stay with you long after you finish the book. …more
The poems are themselves stealthy, hiding but then eventually revealing themselves to the writers. Or the stealth writers, both Seaton and Ace autonomous and authentic somewhere in that collaborative voice. …more
Playwright Alan Bennett set his sights on fiction in his new comedic collection, Smut. …more
Since the early 1980’s, the 51 year old Scottish musician/writer/provocateur Nicholas Currie, better known as Momus, has been releasing music (his latest album, Hypnoprism, was his 18th) to varying levels of critical and commercial success. Since the 1990’s, he has been blogging in various forms, most notably on his old LiveJournal called Click Opera, which Warren Ellis called “probably the best-written blog on the Anglophone web” and of which novelist Dennis Cooper said, “It doesn’t get any better than Click Opera.” …more
Ben Marcus’ fourth novel, The Flame Alphabet, uses well-worn myths as a way to expose and explore the pressing questions that we often forget thrum at the heart of our most common traditions and rituals. …more
When my memoir went out of print, it was as if someone had thrown a stray puppy onto my doorstep. Dazed, mangy, with a tendency to pee on the rug, this orphaned book was something I couldn’t shoo away, or worse, put down, but also something I didn’t have any room for in my life. …more
Haunted by the paradoxes associated with Shakerism that both glorified and doomed it, Kirchwey uses the place of Mount Lebanon to explore a layering of spaces and themes that accesses vast time and situation. …more
The Weary World Rejoices has its unadorned moments of grief, punctuated by moments of energetic wit and intelligent levity. …more
Event Factory is proof that as Renee Gladman has something new to offer, the perspective of invented linguistics encountered as a traveler. …more
Coleman’s work is functional and communal; she wields the oral tradition in a way that reflects her poetry ancestry—the blues queen, Koko Taylor, for example, or the fringe Beat genius, Bob Kaufman—but she also shows planed, hewn lines of intellectual poem-making. …more
In Francois Emmanuel’s new collection Invitation to a Voyage, the prose is elegant and refined, the subject matter heady yet accessible, and the execution nearly flawless. …more
In The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson has not only visited a nation curtained from the rest of the world, but has recreated it with compassion and humanity. The result is a relentless examination of what it means to be human in an inhumane world. …more
I recently read and enjoyed The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides, which is finding itself included on many a “Best of 2011” round-up. My reading experience, however, was one that, while enjoyable and stimulating, also felt somehow agitating. …more
Innovation is at the heart of these poems, and King’s ability to see through the surface to the deeper and often disconnected intricacies of life make them pleasurable and powerful to read. …more
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
Dear Sugar,
I just heard that you plan to reveal your identity at a party The Rumpus is having for you on Valentine’s Day. I don’t know how I feel about that! …more
Lynne Barrett’s story collection, Magpies, soaks in the muggy atmosphere of South Florida, with her well-told stories of swamplands and housing developments. …moreNo? Why not?
We’d like to know the last book you loved and why. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved — a little bit book review and a lot about why you loved it — along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements, but please refrain from reviewing books written by people you know.
Email to: Marie AT therumpus.net
“Wislawa Szymborska, a gentle and reclusive Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, died on Wednesday in Krakow, Poland. She was 88.”
Learn more about Szymborska’s life and achievements here.
Well would you look at that, our pals over at McSweeney’s have a snazzy new (online) store.
In reviewing RENEGADE: Henry Miller and the Making of “Tropic of Cancer,” Jeanette Winterson explores mythmaking in cultural criticism, unearthing who and what gets ignored in the process.
“There is beauty as well as hatred in “Cancer,” and it deserves its place on the shelf. Yet the central question it poses was stupidly buried under censorship in the 1930s, and gleefully swept aside in the permissiveness of the 1960s. Kate Millett asked the question in the 1970s, but the effort to ignore it is prodigious. A new round of mythmaking is ignoring it once more. The question is not art versus pornography or sexuality versus censorship or any question about achievement. The question is: Why do men revel in the degradation of women?”
The Authors Guild argues that the book publishing “ecosystem” is in a precarious situation, largely due to Amazon’s growing industry dominance, which they put in the context of a more general abandonment of protections for non-consumer markets against monopolies.
Ben Marcus will read from his new novel The Flame Alphabet at City Lights Bookstore. Tonight, 7 p.m.
“The Flame Alphabet invites the question: What is left of civilization when we lose the ability to communicate with those we love? Both morally engaged and wickedly entertaining, a gripping page-turner as strange as it is moving, this intellectual horror story ensures Ben Marcus’s position in the first rank of American novelists.”
Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott co-wrote a novella about Donald Rumsfeld with Eric Martin. Now Donald is a play, in Durham, North Carolina.
Review in the News Observer and the Independent Weekly.
In response to Arizona’s decision to ban ethnic studies and expunge associated texts from school shelves, the Occupy Wall Street Library is planning to flood Tucson with copies of the blacklisted books.
“Acting in solidarity with OccupyTucson and the students, parents, and teachers of the Tucson Unified School District we are going to send copies of the banned texts to Tucson for distribution. Lots of copies. As many copies as we can find and buy.”
SF Weekly interviews Ben Marcus about his new novel The Flame Alphabet, which we reviewed last week.
“I’m drawn to the ways that family members can speak to each other. It’s safer within a family, in general, to say the worst things, and get away with it. Some families do that as a matter of habit, and others are more buttoned up and don’t just let fly at each other.”
(Via Well-Read Wife)
You know Amazon? Our tax-evading (can someone please send them “The Throwaways”?), anti-union redefining, sweat-shop aspiring overlord. Remember how they tried to enlist us all in their war on local stores? They have a new trick up their sleeve. The online giant will begin distributing its adult books through Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s New Harvest imprint. Here’s a bit more on the deal, including reactions from bookstores.
“The thing that really sad about this is they’ve asked one of our most respected publishers to do this.”
“If we can find birds on the pages of books, and gods within concrete, it does not seem fantastic to encounter our parents inside of their pots and patios.”
At Full Stop, Peter Nowogrodzki takes a close look at Tan Lin’s The Patio and The Index while reflecting on resurrections and circularity.
HORN! REVIEWS:
Treasure Island!!!
Kevin Thomas reviews the December Rumpus Book Club selection, Treasure Island!!!, Rumpus-Comics style.
Rumpus contributor Roxane Gay details the ins and outs of starting a micropress based on the lessons she’s learned starting Tiny Hardcore Press.
“You have to be prepared to hustle. You have to be willing to promote your book, and do readings, and plan your own events because there’s no support staff at the micropress to do it for you.”
Vice interviews author Edmund White. The conversation covers porn, the perfect man, “gay-lit,” and a lot more.
“No one tries to figure out how someone ended up straight, though it takes just as much explaining as being gay. All etiological arguments are reactionary from the start.”
“I give as much attention to a letter as I do to anything I write.” – William S. Burroughs. (via Jesus Angel Garcia)
I’ve been told that it’s harder to make friends once you are an adult because in order to be close to someone you have to be vulnerable.
I was told this as though it is impossible for mature adults to be vulnerable. We just don’t do that. It’s not allowed. And that really, truly, made me sad. The idea is that you have to put away your inner turmoiled feelings and keep them to yourself in order to be the right kind of person. That disturbs me. …more
It’s not easy to explain David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, especially to a co-worker or a parent, or your wife or your wife’s friend.
First you have to tell them about the format. Yes: there are brief interviews. But you don’t hear the questions and you don’t know who is doing the interviewing or why. …more
Didion in conversation with Sheila Heti.
We also make an exception for a list if it’s really funny, and we’re on it. Hence: Paul Bogaards’ “Hierarchy of Book Publishing: The Top 100.”