Brigitte Aiton, Age 44
New York, New York
“How do you deal with the fact that the person you’re with might hate you?”
It was the first summer we were together. We were twenty-three years old. …more
Kay Ryan has been compared to Emily Dickinson, and I like to imagine Dickinson and Marianne Moore reading her with sly commiseration. Unlike some poets with recognizable styles, Ryan does not write the same poem again and again, and her sharp eye is both benevolent and unflinching.
A former neo-Nazi’s memoir describes a violent life in the white supremacist movement and his transformative experiences in prison. …more
I have been stalking—I mean reading—Chang-rae Lee since his first book, Native Speaker, was published in 1994. …more
Peter Bognanni’s first novel mixes punk rock and the wild creativity of Buckminster Fuller into a tender and believable chronicle of teen sorrow. …more
“Big American Trip addresses our insecurities as artists, lovers, and citizens who lack the ability to understand one another, regardless of which language we speak.” …more
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Reality Hunger, the newest book from the always interesting David Shields, comes sheathed in glowing blurbs from the likes of Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, Amy Hempel and Jonathan Lethem. Needless to say, I had high expectations …more
“This voice is neither howl, yowl, nor whisper, but something more like a quiet monotone, slightly ironic and yet also depressed, lonely, and compellingly vulnerable.” …more
We did right by your death and went out,
Right away, to a public place to drink,
To be with each other, to face it. …more
The Ask tells the story of Milo Burke, the latest in Lipsyte’s long line of anti-heroes. By the end, Lipsyte has strengthened his claim as our greatest comic novelist. …more
A new volume of stories by Mavis Gallant traces the writer’s development from early stories of bewilderment and disappointment to the sharp, incisive later work of a master. …more
Ali Shaw’s novel concerns a modern-day Midas, a cold and inhospitable island, and a young woman whose body is inexorably transforming. …more
A first novel by playwright Jillian Weise tackles the moral and ethical questions surrounding both medical research and human relationships. …more
The poems in The Ancient Book of Hip create a precise and evocative description of time and place; they celebrate that space, even as they have a witty undercurrent of critique.
Paula Fox is the author of six novels, including the landmark Desperate Characters. She has also written two memoirs, Borrowed Finery and The Coldest Winter and won numerous awards for these and her twenty-two children’s books. Now 86, she lives in the same brownstone in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn she bought in 1970 after the sale of the film rights for Desperate Characters. …more
Dreams, vignettes, hypotheticals, and poetry lay out alternate versions of Western literature’s founding epic. …more
Heidi W. Durrow’s novel is both the story of a woman learning to negotiate biracial life and that of the lone survivor of a horrible tragedy. …more
In stories that range through history, serendipity, speculation, whimsy, and horror, Daniel Olivas chronicles the lives of characters who have loved—and lost—Los Angeles. …more
“We write because we can’t not write. We want to make music out of our breath; we want to be under the power of an art that toys with us and could destroy us, but which allows us to get a glimpse of what’s real.” …more
Geoffrey Becker’s second novel races across the country in the company of “spiritual beings having a human experience.” …more
I’ve been trying to count how many times I’ve penned myself profiles for dating advertisements, and the truth is I can’t. Since my first major relationship ended in May of 1990, I have been so often so completely dateless, and I have so often thrown myself on the cold, strange mercy of lonelyhearts adverts that I can’t even begin to say how many times I have summed myself up in a 100 words (or fewer). …more
What Jelloun proves throughout this book is that he has not let language(s) fail him or the people, places and historical moments he memorializes, making dates that are not headlines as important as front page news.
In June 1964 Hunter S. Thompson wrote a, for lack of a better word, gonzo letter to President Lyndon Johnson from the Holiday Inn in Pierre, South Dakota …more
The essays in For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs explore the many successes and admirable qualities of their author. …more
What makes a good title? What makes a bad one?
And how do you know when you’ve found the right one? …more
David Shields, author of three novels and seven works of nonfiction, attempts to demolish the foundations of literature in his latest, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. His target: the culture. He argues that there has been a dreadful trend in fiction, and not just genre …more
The characters in this debut collection of short stories are soaked, tossed, drowned, and washed away by love. …more
Dumitru Tsepeneag is a Romanian novelist, essayist and one of the founders of the Romanian Oniric literary movement. Established in the mid-60s, the Oniric group was inspired by surrealism and built an aesthetic platform centered on dreams. As one of the only Romanian counter-cultural literary movements at that time, the Oniric Group was largely suppressed. With Ceaucescu’s rise to power, the movement was banned entirely. …more
Many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia [Plath], showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but not silence.
To say that I’ve had a checkered history in publishing would be like saying Elizabeth Taylor had a checkered history in marriage. …more
No? Why not?
We’d like to know the last book you loved. Send us a writeup of the last book you truly loved, along with a short bio. We’ll publish our favorites in The Rumpus blog. No length requirements.
Email to: Isaac AT therumpus.net
Nicholas Sparks, author of such books as The Notebook and A Walk to Remember, was recently profiled by USA Today.
Why do we know this? Because the article has author and Rumpus contributor Joshua Mohr in a bit of a tizzy… and by “a bit of a tizzy” what we really mean is “begging to duke it out with the mega-best-selling author.”
In the article Sparks “compares himself to Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Hemingway” and “slams Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian as ‘pulpy’ and ‘overwrought.’” He also states, “There are no authors in my genre. No one is doing what I do.”
Well Mohr won’t stand for it, and he throws down the gauntlet: “Let’s tussle soon, you and me; before you write another thing.” It all makes for some fun Friday reading; it’d be even better if Sparks answered the challenge.
Two pieces of writing that caught my eye today were Bridget Potter’s essay “Lucky Girl” in Guernica, and Joshua Cohen’s “Thirty-Six Shades of Prussian Blue” in Triple Canopy.
Potter’s startling essay relays her experience getting an illegal abortion as a nineteen-year-old in 1962 America, and the bevy of options and predicaments that came along with it–the social stigma of being an unwed mother, her humorous if stygian attempts to self-abort, and her final lone and costly trip by which she saved face. The title is sincere and ironic, revealing both Potter’s precarious position and her fortune at having survived a procedure by which, around that time, seventeen percent of women reportedly died yearly in the U.S. …more
“The best crime fiction today is actually talking to us about the same things big literary novels are talking about. They are talking about moral questions, taking ordinary people and putting them in extraordinary situations, and saying to the reader, ‘How would you cope in this situation?’ Or saying, ‘How would you feel about living in a world in which this these crimes are allowed to happen?’”
Author Ian Rankin discusses the “divide” between crime fiction and literature. (via Author Scoop)
Illustrations by Elzbieta Gaudasinska for The Sun has Fallen into the Sack by Jerzy Bieniecki (Poland, 1975).
As you can see, the book was actually published in English translation — but only in Poland. …more
After a hiatus of a few years, the intellectually-engaging, always interesting, often confrontational and downright maverick literary/cultural magazine The Baffler has returned!
I just picked up my copy at the bookstore where I work. Most bookstores with a decent magazine rack should carry at least a couple copies. At least the ones in San Francisco do. But even then it can be hard to find. …more
“These new books share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity.”
From Michiko Kakutani’s latest Times piece, “Texts Without Context,” in which she considers a number of recent books, mostly the ones that she finds to be “nuanced ruminations on some of the unreckoned consequences of technological change,” focusing on Farhad Manjoo’s True Enough and You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier — with whom the Rumpus is arranging an interview at present.
“How certain are you, anyhow, that what you call ‘unpleasantness’ is not a necessary, even crucial, part of our experience?
Maybe you should lock yourself up in your heart long enough to work out your actual relationship to matters like shame, loss, envy, panic, brutality, greed, insecurity, loneliness, failure, whatever you find particularly unpleasant. Because that, dimwit, is where you live, especially if you really hate the whole idea of familiarity with such crappy, low-rent feeling states.”
At The Millions author Peter Straub makes a strong case for taking horror as seriously as anything else.
“As lightbulbs are to the moon, first stories are to finished books.”
The Morning News talks with author Philip Graham about publishing his first short story, writing dispatches for McSweeney’s, and being edited by a former student.
“Amazon.com has threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online unless they agree to a detailed list of concessions regarding the sale of electronic books, according to two industry executives with direct knowledge of the discussions.”
The eBook price war continues, and while Amazon has backed down in the past, it looks like the online store still wants to fight to “retain its wholesale pricing model…”
(via PW)
Well here’s some good news for all you short fiction writers: “The Atlantic is going to start publishing fiction again.”
“I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.”
That’s what William Faulkner said in 1950 while accepting the Nobel Prize for literature, and he should know, because “even Faulkner had a day job.”
(For those interested, you can read Faulkner’s entire Nobel speech here.)
At least as well known for his boozing as for his books, iconic Irish author Brendan Behan (1923 – 1964) was a rollicking, larger-than-life Gaelic knockabout—a foul-mouthed, furry-chested stereotype of the drunken Paddy. In fact, the polemical playwright and legendary dipsomaniac once sardonically summarized himself as “a drinker with writing problems.”
Behan was, at one time or another, a Borstal boy ( = reform school inmate), an I.R.A. “messenger” (he was an explosives expert with a special preference for gelignite), an inveterate jailbird, a busker, a pornographer, and a house painter. He was, at all times, a rebel and all-around hellbender. …more
![Two statesmen drowning their cares, Tim Bobbin [i.e. John Collier], 1772](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4034/4439466583_7b88b2831e.jpg)
“Why Don Pedro Drinks”
by José Marín Cañas
Translated by Gilbert Alter-Gilbert
“Why Don Pedro Drinks” is from José Marín Cañas’ 1929 collection of crepuscular tales about alcoholics, The Rum Bums (Los bigardos del ron).
Nobody had any idea, until that night, what made Don Pedro drink. …more
“Why do Tao’s negative book reviews seem to always cite as evidence Tao’s gimmickry?”
Brandon Scott Gorrell, author of During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present, has posted a review concerning negative reviews of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting From American Apparel.
Update: An interesting argument has broken out in the piece’s comments section about book reviews and reviews in general (it somewhat mirrors a similar debate we had here).
“The recent recession hit the book industry just like it did every other business, and even though we’re emerging from the chasm, book sales haven’t completely recovered, so publishers are being much more careful than they were a few years ago.”
GalleyCat talks with literary agent Jim Donovan, who has been in the business for 17 years and has “seen the world of books from every angle, editor, book seller, and author.”
HTMLGiant asks an important question: does your life suck (normal life) or blow (successful writer’s life)?
“Think of a bookplate as a wedding ring binding the reader to the book, and vice versa. The symbolism isn’t so far apart: ownership, possession, desire. [...] The digital book has no front or back covers; there is no place to assert ownership, and there is nothing to own.”
Alex Beam is worried about the future of bookplates (the marker inside a book’s cover that allows the owner of a book to leave their mark… think “This Book Belongs to…”) in the coming digital age.
Also, be sure not to miss the slideshow of Yale’s bookplate collection. (via PW)
“Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they’re running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.”
The Book Bench talks with Junot Díaz.
This week, the San Francisco Asian American Film Festival is in full swing, catch Paul Madonna at Sketch Tuesday, assuage the pain of your own coyote-ugly experiences at Bawdy Storytelling’s Too Close For Comfort reading, and celebrate your favorite ephemera on international Obscura Day!
Monday 3/15: Head down to Viz Cinema tonight for a screening of Yang Fudong’s Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest as a part of the 2010 San Francisco Asian American Film Festival. The festival, which began last Thursday, runs through the end of the week and features films from Asian and Asian-American artists that span the globe. Tickets $12, 9pm at 1746 Post Street. …more
What makes a good title? The Great Gatsby is one for the ages—but it wasn’t Fitzgerald’s idea. He wanted to call his novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss dreamed up for The Playboy Channel.
