The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Like Proust, David Mitchell examines how the incidents of a person’s life fit together, how the different parts of the world come to form one world.
The voice that animates The French Exit is smart and philosophically dexterous, capable of showing the self to be a fetish-object of its own and also a refractive subject of Lacanian devotion, as a mirror which doesn’t so much distort as endless “reveal,” like the panopticon eye of a camera. …more
A Rumpus Meditation on Editors, Ambition, and Angry Dependence (in 33 loosely jointed parts):
1. On July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Kevin Morrissey, took his life. His note stated that he “just couldn’t bear it anymore.” …more
Steve Almond, one of our favorite authors and frequent contributor to The Rumpus, stopped by the Rumpus Radio suite/apartment to talk about publishing, politics, media and community. Comedian Nato Green co-hosts along with Rumpus managing editor Isaac Fitzgerald. You can listen here, download the episode stevealmond.mp3, or listen to Rumpus Radio in iTunes.
When I emailed Shalom Auslander, inviting him to help me summon the courage necessary to write first-person non-fiction my parents might not like, he wrote back: “Any time I can help drive a wedge between family members, I’m happy to try.” …more
James Longenbach’s fourth book of poems, The Iron Key, feels like it has itself arrived from a different era. It oozes nostalgia for the many charms of Venice, the complexities of Greek myths, and the ethereal pleasures of opera and poetry that is, paradoxically, both old-fashioned and refreshing. …more
It was 11:30 on a Tuesday night and the bar at Jumbo’s Clown Room was packed. I was instantly moved by the spirit of Ramona, a tall black stripper in a tutu with pink wings attached to her back, gliding across the stage to Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” in ratty toe shoes. …more
Like boxes in storage, Andrea Scrima’s memories are itinerant. Wherever she resides, nothing seems to be in the right place. …more
Lydia Davis is the author of four short story collections, as well as The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis and the novel The End of the Story. A MacArthur Fellow, she has been a finalist for many major book awards and this September will release her translation of Madame Bovary. …more
Lina ramona Vitkauskas asks, and her collection stands as an intrepid answer, the question as to why haute couture, avant-garde and post avant-garde cinema, Derrida, and marine life should be at odds, offering her reader startling juxtapositions vis a vis an unmistakable voice that sounds out as often as it retracts in the act of listening. …more
The principle urban conversation today seems to revolve around authenticity. The relationship many white urbanites have to their city depends on the story they tell about their neighborhoods. Are they authentic, i.e. did they move in before gentrification, and therefore “good.” Or are they one of the soulless homogenizers who arrive when the neighborhood is “safe” (white) and devoid of all realness. …more
A lost literary voice from early 1900s Austria slyly addresses female self-loathing and finds answers with unsettling modern relevance. …more
The brainy British novelist David Mitchell is a member of that elite club of living writers—Pynchon, Coetzee—who have spawned an obscene amount of critical adoration. …more
Rumpus Poetry Book Club advisory board member Gabrielle Calvocoressi on why she chose Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation to be the group’s September selection. …more
Dear Sugar,
I write like a girl. I write about my lady life experiences, and that usually comes out as unfiltered emotion, unrequited love, and eventual discussion of my vagina as metaphor. …more
A short novel by Michael Knight sees the post-WWII occupation of Japan through the eyes of a confused typist in General MacArthur’s office. …more
Laird’s steps are sure, his undermusic and undercurrents consistently strong. On Purpose is a slim volume that contains multitudes. …more
A year and a half ago, I started practicing yoga because I wasn’t feeling well. I could barely touch my toes and felt very self-conscious in yoga classes, but kept practicing because I started to feel better.
I didn’t know why I was feeling better, so I went to the literature. …more
The stories in Mary Hamilton’s very, very short collection are vivid, surreal, experimental, funny, and emotionally devastating. …more
Doller’s facility with language, and his wheeling imagination, which pushes language into fresh directions, never ceases to delight the reader. …more
Manu Joseph’s satirizes contemporary India, “pounding away at the caste system like a pitcher repeatedly throwing his best fastball.” …more
Have you ever loved a book enough to steal it? I have. A man named John Gilkey has. He’s stolen many. He has bibliokleptomania. He’s a man who can’t stop himself from stealing books. …more
Each conceit, each stanza, each line in Lovely, Raspberry sparkles with such wonderful ambiguity of thought that is, paradoxically, a type of clarity; through Belz’s absurdism, aspects of the human condition are illumined in unique, resonant fashion. …more
Neela Vaswani is author of the award-winning short story collection Where the Long Grass Bends (2004). An education activist in India and the U.S., she lives in New York and is the founder of the Storylines Project with the New York Public Library. …more
An account of the marriage between Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller says a lot about the actress’s hygiene and sexual habits. The relationship, not so much. …more
I finished The God of Small Things in a pleathery airplane seat 30,000 feet above who-knows-where during the year and a half I lived in India as a speechwriter for an executive there. …more
“Zahlah quit the bed and saw her dark reflection in the full-length mirror. An American woman. That’s what she saw. Liberated and humiliated.” …more
Monday at 3pm is the last chance to sign up for The Rumpus Book Club and receive Tao Lin’s new novel, Richard Yates, nearly a month ahead of its release date. Here are four questions, and four answers, about his newest work. …more

(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995)
Graduation Party
It looks, from a distance, like a track and field tourney:
so much avid motion in shorts and T-shirts
the college field house rented for the occasion …more
So what are Mazer’s actual poems like? They are, in their way, haunted. …more
All images from Le Livre de Sante by Joseph Handler (Monte Carlo: Andre Sauret, 1967): …more
Tired of waiting weeks or even MONTHS for back-cover endorsements from recognizable authors? I, Mickey Hess, will blurb any book – that’s right, ANY book – within 24 hours! Just look at these satisfied customers:
Plano Fox and Zenbar Harris’ Matriculating from Malaysia: “First off, I should mention that I don’t blurb friends. That said, Plano Fox and I have never seen eye-to-eye on things, and Harris strikes me as kind of a dick.” – Mickey Hess …more

We’re giving away four tickets to see Jonathan Franzen at City Arts and Lectures in San Francisco.
To enter you have to be a member of The Jonathan Franzen One-Off Book Club. You don’t have to participate in the book club but you do have to buy the book from an independent bookstore (we also have two copies left to sell).
Then tell us something about Jonathan Franzen, or yourself. We’ll announce the winners here.
The memorial award established by McSweeney’s in 2004, the Amanda Davis Highwire Award, is now open to applicants again.
The award “is intended to aid a young woman writer of 32 years or younger who both embodies Amanda’s personal strengths—warmth, generosity, a passion for community—and who needs some time to finish a book in progress. The book in progress needn’t be thematically or stylistically close to Amanda’s work, but we would be lying if we said we weren’t looking to support another writer of Amanda’s outrageous lyricism and heart.”
“When you have me as I’m standing / Against a wall” ignites memories of intimacy that overcome the who, what, where, and when of relationships. Intense moments have a quality of sameness. You feel alive in that moment, not specific, and this poem offers some words where there are none. A good kiss has a color, a hue, a luminescence that “hangs like a valuable stone above us.”
Love can be quick and easy, especially without any social norms governing exactly how many poems you can love at one time. …more
Would I find Cortazar?
But I wasn’t really looking for Cortazar when I read his masterpiece, Hopscotch. I was, I’m sorry to say, looking for myself. And just to make the cliché complete, I was looking for myself while living a bohemian existence in Buenos Aires, with little idea of how I got there or where I was going next, after quitting a corporate job in New York. …more

Illustrations by Hana Stepanova for Florentina by James Kruss (Prague, 1967): …more
Tired of waiting weeks or even MONTHS for back-cover endorsements from recognizable authors? I, Mickey Hess, will blurb any book – that’s right, ANY book – within 24 hours! Just look at these satisfied customers:
Shya Scanlon’s Forecast: “As writers, we are constantly lugging around somebody else’s body. We deserve so little, yet ask for rewards such as accolades. There are stories that Shya Scanlon wants to tell, narratives about money, summer camp experiences, and a former America.” – Mickey Hess …more
This week, moving into my new apartment takes much longer than I thought it would, this guy talks about UFOs at Amnesia, The Exploratorium gets spacey new installation art, and SF Zine Fest takes over the San Francisco County Fair building!
Monday 8/30: For the first time since the inception of Notable San Francisco, I’ve dropped the ball. In my defense, moving house on top of being a full time student and having a day job was just more than I could handle today, and I really couldn’t bear to give you less than one hundred and ten percent. Also, The Rumpus pays me in hamburgers and hugs. Not that I don’t love both hamburgers and hugs. So this Monday, cook yourself a nice meal, crack open that semi-fancy bottle of wine someone brought over that one time, and settle in with Ted Wilson’s latest review of the world or Antonia Crane’s recent interview/essay about the one-of-a-kind strip club carnival that is Jumbo’s Clown Room. …more
Thomas Pynchon’s 2006 letter defending author Ian McEwan against accusations of plagiarism has been posted online.
(via TheMillions)
Rumpus Book Club member and artist extraordinaire Kevin Thomas on reading The Four Fingers of Death and dog sitting: …more

Book and magazine covers by Swedish graphic designer Olle Eksell (1918-2007): …more
Tired of waiting weeks or even MONTHS for back-cover endorsements from recognizable authors? I, Mickey Hess, will blurb any book – that’s right, ANY book – within 24 hours! Just look at these satisfied customers:
John Jodzio’s If You Lived Here You’d Already be Home: “When I saw that John Jodzio’s book has a blurb from Chuck Klosterman, I was like What the hell? Man, I asked Chuck Klosterman for a blurb and he never responded.” – Mickey Hess …more
It’s that time again: here’s some very short nonfiction that’ll only take a minute to read but that will make you feel something.
“Connie was albino, exceptionally white even by the ultra-Caucasian standards of our southern suburb. Only her eyelids had color: mouse-nose pink, framed by moth-white lashes and brows.” — At Brevity, “White Lies” by Erin Murphy.
“Had God not become an extremist, tipping the scales, there would still exist today an equiponderant balance between what you might consider good and evil.” — At elimae, “Jesus was Cute” by Kim Teeple.
“I shared my first kiss with two boys, best friends.” At Eclectica, “Kissing in Tandem” by Valerie Fioravanti.
“On each day she was supposed to write a reason to live.” At The Collagist, “Light” by Michael Palmer.
I’m always looking for journals with a web presence that publish excellent flash nonfiction. If you know of any good sites I might be missing, put a note in the comments section or send me an email.
Tired of waiting weeks or even MONTHS for back-cover endorsements from recognizable authors? I, Mickey Hess, will blurb any book – that’s right, ANY book – within 24 hours! Just look at these satisfied customers:
Paul Muldoon’s Wayside Shrines: “During graduate school, I once stabbed myself with a Paul Muldoon poem (I had to have surgery). It’s like it had all the answers – it was fraught with human life. In Muldoon’s world, there would be no boring, 400-page books. Just flea market curiosities and the American Dream.” – Mickey Hess …more
“But there’s a more pressing issue at hand: after little Joshua—the story’s grinning, crapping hero—learns where to drop his bombs, he does not once wear pants.”
— At The Millions, Jacob Lambert laments the subversive nature of Once Upon a Potty and other children’s picture books.
Maybe you can’t judge a book by it’s cover, but you can refuse to sell it if it features Alexander the Great’s butt.
Ron Charles wants to tell you about how to make a hip book review. (via)
The LA Times has a literary tour of New Orleans for you. (via)
Electric Lit has a cool new one sentence animation of Patrick DeWitt’s short story.
Roy Peter Clark on how grammar is really magic. This is a really good interview.
It’d be a good idea to click on where it says “…more.” Rumpus Books kind of kicked ass this week. …more
The October book club selection is The Instructions by Adam Levin, published by McSweeney’s. The Instructions is 1,024 pages, hardcover.
The November book club selection is a Rumpus Paper Internets hardcover original, Rumpus Women Vol. I, edited by Elissa Bassist and Julie Greicius.
Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom will begin shipping this Monday to the Jonathan Franzen One-Off Book Club subscribers.
Our September book club selection, Lan Samantha Chang’s All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost, will ship Wednesday, September 1st.
We’re now shipping our September poetry club selection, Timothy Donnelly’s The Cloud Corporation.
The poetry club discussion with Shane Book is this Sunday at 6pm. The book club discussion with Tao Lin is Thursday, September 2nd at 6pm. The conversation with Jonathan Franzen is September 23 at 1pm. All times Pacific.
If you’re an international subscriber and you joined at the original price of $25 a month we’re going to have to unsubscribe you after this month. To resubscribe at the international rate without having your subscriptions overlap contact Isaac at isaac AT therumpus.net.
If you’re a member of one of the book clubs and you’re not on the announcement list, and therefore didn’t know when the discussion with the author is happening, send an email to isaac AT therumpus.net and ask to be put on the list.
Shake and bake.