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We are thrilled to share that our September Book Club selection is Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado (Graywolf Press, October 2017)!
In this highly anticipated debut collection, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women’s lives and the violence visited upon their bodies.
...moreThrough August 15, purchase a yearly Letters in the Mail subscription or a 6-month Rumpus Book Club subscription and we’ll send you your own signed, hardcover copy of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by bestselling author—and Rumpus Essays Editor Emeritus and Advisory Board member—Roxane Gay!
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We’re thrilled to announce that our August Book Club selection is Wioletta Greg’s Swallowing Mercury!
In this celebrated debut from the prize-winning poet, Wiola looks back on her youth in a close-knit, agricultural community in 1980s Poland. Her memories are precise, intense, distinctive, sensual: a playfulness and whimsy rise up in the gossip of the village women, rumored visits from the Pope, and the locked room in the dressmaker’s house, while political unrest and predatory men cast shadows across this bright portrait.
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We’re super excited to share that our July Book Club selection is New People by Danzy Senna! From the bestselling author of Caucasia, New People is a subversive and engrossing novel about race, class, and manners in contemporary America. Heartbreaking and darkly comic, New People is a bold and unfettered page-turner that challenges our every assumption about how we define one another, and ourselves.
Before I tell you more, a quick reminder that in order to receive your copy of Lessons on Expulsion, read along with the Poetry Book Club, and participate in our exclusive chat with Erika, you’ll need to to subscribe by May 20!
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We’re excited to share that our June Book Club pick is The Tower of the Antilles by Achy Obejas! The Cubans in Obejas’s new story collection are haunted by an island: the island they fled, the island they’ve created, the island they were taken to or forced from, the island they long for, the island they return to, and the island that can never be home again.
We’re thrilled to share that our May Book Club pick is We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby! Samantha is the author of Meaty: Essays and creator of the blog “bitches gotta eat.” The essays in We Are Never Meeting in Real Life span topics as varied as living on a budget, explaining why Irby should be the next Bachelorette, a disastrous pilgrimage-slash-romantic-vacation to Nashville to scatter her estranged father’s ashes, and advice on how to navigate friendships with former drinking buddies who are now suburban moms.
I am drawn to poetry about the difficulties of family, about the pain of feeling one is a disappointment to their parents, about the sense of separation that can come as a result. Chen Chen’s debut collection is filled with work which explores this universe.
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We’re very excited to share that our March Book Club pick is Marlena, the debut novel from Julie Buntin. Marlena tells the story of a powerful teenage friendship between two girls, and its aftermath. Edan Lepucki, author of the bestselling novel California, writes:
...moreIn Marlena, Julie Buntin revitalizes a classic story making it all her own with sensuous, vibrant prose and a narrator who feels deeply even as she feints certain painful truths about herself.
Shakespeare’s texts are anything but stagnant, often taking on new meanings depending on the context in which they’re experienced. In an excerpt from The Maximum Security Book Club, Mikita Brottman describes her experience of teaching Shakespeare in a maximum security prison:
...moreI like to stay open to misreadings.
The Rumpus Book Clubs have been around for over six years now and they remain unique in a couple of important ways. First, we only feature pre-release books—that is, books that haven’t gone on sale yet, so you’re getting copies before anyone else (sometimes before the authors receive their personal copies!).
...moreThere are no shortages of serendipitous tales of celebrities meeting up with their average-Joe fans through something as small as a Twitter exchange. For one library in Scotland, an exchange of teasing Twitter messages led to J.K. Rowling making an actual appearance for a book club covering her book The Cuckoo’s Calling (written under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith).
...moreWhen Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg decided to launch a book club, book publishers were hoping the billions of Facebook users would translate into book sales. But the numbers are in, and Zuckerberg is no Oprah: BetaBoston reports that though The End of Power sold out on Amazon, it only sold 13,000 copies.
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The Rumblr is combining two of the best things on the Internet: The Rumpus Book Club and Tumblr. So, for those of you who (unimaginably) have yet to subscribe to the official club, you can get your feet wet with us on your dashboard.
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In a post titled “The New Golden Age of Online Book Clubs,” Flavorwire shouts out the Rumpus Book Club as one of many sites using new technology to recreate the age-old pleasure of talking about books.
(For an example of the joys of our book club, see today’s chat with Matthew Specktor, whose novel American Dream Machine book club subscribers got to read before it came out in bookstores.)
Thanks, Flavorwire, we love you back!
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The Rumpus Book Club chats with Ru Freeman about On Sal Mal Lane, war as seen through children’s eyes, and Sinhalese cuss words.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with D.A. Powell about his poetry collection Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys.
This is an edited transcript of the Poetry Book Club discussion with D.A.Powell. Every month The Rumpus Poetry Book Club hosts a discussion online with the club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview.
...moreThe 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.
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The Rumpus Book Club talks with Adam Levin about The Instructions, Bar Mitzvahs, thinking you’re the Messiah, and what it’s like to publish a 1,000+ page book.
The Instructions is this month’s Rumpus Book Club selection. Published by McSweeney’s the book is 1,024 pages. John Brown was probably the first member of the book club to finish it.
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Update: SOLD OUT. SORRY 🙁
My name is Kim Locke and I live in the suburban commuter metropolis of Brampton, Ontario, Canada.
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