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From Stephen Elliott
Susan Wright, activist, writer, and founder of the National Coalition for Sexual Freedom, sits down to discuss the recent Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders updates, and what they mean for the kink community.
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Tory Adkisson reviews Matthew Hittinger’s Skin Shift today in Rumpus Poetry.
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I have, I admit, no idea what Renata Adler’s Speedboat is about. Really, not the foggiest. But this is a very special sort of mystification, an unqualified – maybe even a purer – kind of no idea than my usual ‘what-the-fuck-is-going-on?’ kind of no idea.
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Following in the steps of such modern day masters of this intricate form, including Lydia Davis and Kim Chinquee, Scott Garson has embraced it, bringing his own brand of American disharmony often seen in those forbears. The majority of stories in his second collection Is That You, John Wayne? run from a page long to three and they are the crux of this collection bent on exploring the sadness of life, the missed or missing opportunities, and the stasis our collective cultures seemed to have emotionally entered while we fly and speed about with technology that probably has not made us treat each other any better.
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The author of the stunning collection Spectacle explores connections between visual art and the written word, experimental writing, Virginia Woolf, cowardice, and more.
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Patrick James Dunagan reviews Ana Božičević’s Rise in the Fall today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Jon Mooallem, author of Wild Ones, sits down to discuss human attitudes towards animals, copulation hats, chasing Martha Stewart across the tundra, and the historical relationship between Thomas Jefferson and mammoths.
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Robin Morrissey reviews Paul Hoover’s Desolation: Souvenir today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Writer, performer, educator, and activist David Henry Sterry talks about the deep cultural roots of shame associated with the American sex industry, and how freeing it can be to bleed out the truth about our lives as buyers and sellers of sex.
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Ariel Schrag first achieved recognition in her teens, when she began writing the autobiographical comic books Awkward, Definition, Potential, and Likewise
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Marisa Siegel reviews Carrie Olivia Adams’s Forty-One Jane Doe’s today in Rumpus Poetry.
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In Body Geographic, Barrie Jean Borich charts the route by which she came to be located in middle age, in the Midwest, and in long-term love with Linnea, a spouse who occupies the middle space of gender. Through jazz, photography, travel, sex, and lineage—including several generations of coffee pots—Borich tells of her individual journey towards full, adult consciousness, towards certitude of self and place.
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“What we know about the undead so far is this: they return to the familiar.” Thus begins Bennett Sims’ debut novel A Questionable Shape. The subject matter of this brilliantly sensitive, whip-smart new novel is at first glance almost overbearingly familiar.
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A day of celebration for many, Mother’s Day is a more complex holiday for people who have lost their mothers–or their children.
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Weston Cutter reviews Lauren Shapiro’s Easy Math today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Writer Maria Konnikova explores the mechanisms behind how a sharp mind works, through an investigation of one of literature’s premier duos—Sherlock Holmes and his sidekick, Watson.
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Barbara Berman reviews Joseph Ceravolo’s Collected Poems today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Poet Denise Duhamel talks about form, inspiration sparked by pole-dancing dolls and movies, and the art of constructing prose poems to fit on Venetian blinds.
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I like Patricia Vigderman because she likes jickjacking. She describes in “A Writer’s Harvest”, an earlier piece in Possibility: Essays Against Despair, how the sight of that slangy word, in two distinct (but linked) stories—one by Mary Karr, the other by David Foster Wallace—motivate her toward personal tangents and pleasures.
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Jason Storms reviews Dan Boehl’s Kings of the F**king Sea today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Within the crowd is a bald-headed, bearded man. He carries a sketchpad that, if he were sitting cross-legged, would be big enough to cover his knees. He is not a reporter. “The funeral is over, but the corpse is still grooving,” he writes. The man is Shel Silverstein.
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An Elegy for Mathematics, Anne Valente’s first full-length release, is a wonderful little book. Checking in at fewer than fifty pages, it’s a quick but deeply layered and poignant collection of material, most of which was previously published online. (She has a forthcoming story collection coming out from Dzanc Books.)
The collection is comprised of thirteen stories, mostly only a few pages in length.
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Puerto Rican writer, journalist, editor, and queer activist Luis Negrón talks about his first collection to appear in English, working with translator Suzanne Jill Levine, and writing about people who live on the margins of the margins.
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At a time when most authors, and even editors, are still trying to get a handle on this whole digital publishing thing, simply publishing e-books is already a thing of the past for writer Miracle Jones.
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Some novels defy gravity, spanning years and crossing ruined landscapes and entire solar systems of characters while still maintaining an ethereal, almost impossible lightness. Anthony Marra’s debut novel is one of them, and it does indeed call to mind an astronomical marvel.
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On the year anniversary of its publication, Anna March contemplates the impact Jürgen Fauth’s Kino made on her.
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Joe Winkler reviews the Collected Poems of Marcel Proust today in Rumpus Poetry.
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Autumn Elizabeth reviews Henry Williams’s seasons smooth and unperplext today in Rumpus Poetry.
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A multi-generation novel is a risky thing. What gives it that unity that distinguishes a novel from a book of linked short stories? How does an author handle the passage of time or the death of her protagonist as one generation cedes to the next and the next?
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Hip Mama, which started as Ariel Gore’s student project at Mills College in Oakland and debuted as a zine in 1993, elevated Gore to rockstar status
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