The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
Monday 05/20:
The Belladonna* Collective’s Hot Texts series continues with readings from Lauren Hunter, Samantha Zighelboim, Allison Power, and Christine Kanownik. The Way Station, 6:30pm, $5 suggested donation.
The Poetry Project hosts Ross Gay and Lauren Shufran. St. Mark’s Church, 8pm, free.
...moreHenry Miller hated Brooklyn almost as passionately as he loved Big Sur and dirty sex. In “Henry Miller, Brooklyn Hater,” Alexander Nazaryan takes a look at Miller’s lifelong contempt for the borough.
In a 1975 documentary, Miller refers to Brooklyn as:
...morea place where I knew nothing but starvation, humiliation, despair, frustration, every god damn thing—nothing but misery.
Monday 05/13:
Emily Books presents “What is the Queer Novel?” featuring a reading and discussion with Sarah Schulman and Barbara Browning. Housing Works Bookstore, 7pm, free.
The Franklin Park Reading Series welcomes a killer line-up featuring The Rumpus’ Roxane Gay, Karen Russell, Elissa Schappell, Leigh Newman, and Michael Heald.
...moreMonday 05/06:
Ben Greenman heads to the Franklin Park Reading Series to celebrate the release of his new novel The Slippage
Monday 04/29:
The PEN World Voices Festival is celebrating its ninth year and kicks off tonight with a reading titled Bravery. Hosted by comedian and author Baratunde Thurston, the reading will feature readings from “Najwan Darwish, ‘one of the 39 best Arab writers under the age of 40′; Joy Harjo, a formidable voice in the second wave of ‘Native American Renaissance’; Mikhail Shishkin, one of the best contemporary Russian writers; award-winning Caribbean writers Jamaica Kincaid and Earl Lovelace; 2012 German Book Prize winner Ursula Krechel; Air Force Lieutenant Colonel in the U.S.
Monday 04/22:
You might have thought, Dustin, I’m glad to be through with your long (for this column) digressions on OBERIU. I’m glad it’s over. You would be a fool. I’m not done. On Monday you should definitely be at the Russian Underground Poetry reading.
Monday 04/08:
Monday Night Poetry features award-winning poet Major Jackson and author of the great What Is Amazing
The Franklin Park Reading Series welcomes Heidi Julavits, Fiona Maazel, Teddy Wayne, David Gilbert, and Maris Kreizman.
...moreMonday 04/01:
Monday night the Poetry Project presents An Evening with Clark Coolidge featuring readings from Coolidge, Peter Gizzi, Marcella Durand, Miles Champion, Ron Padgett, Bill Corbett, Anne Waldman, John Godfrey, Geoffrey Young, and Thurston Moore. St. Mark’s Church, 8pm.
MONDAY 03/25:
Head to An Evening with The Believer tonight. The event will be introduced by The Believer editor Andrew Leland and will feature readings from Joanna Fuhrman, Alan Gilbert, and Margo Jefferson, as well as a conversation between The Believer editor Ross Simonini and author Gary Lutz.
MONDAY 03/11: Electric Literature and Lazy Fascist Press celebrate the release of Sam Pink’s new novel Rontel
“We both know what memories can bring, they bring diamonds and rust.” –Joan Baez
...more“Like many people who moved to San Francisco in the early 1990s, I did it because San Francisco was cheap,” Ken Layne writes in a post for the Awl titled “Is San Francisco the Brooklyn to Silicon Valley’s Unbuilt Manhattan?
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Tomorrow is the Brooklyn Book Festival, which means everyone in Brooklyn will gather in auditoria and listen to writers speak. Because many of these writers will be from Brooklyn themselves. Because, as Colson Whitehead remarked, “Google ‘brooklyn writer’ and you’ll get, Did you mean: the future of literature as we know it?”
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Reviewing Sunset Park, I am behaving like a Paul Auster character, imagining a dialogue with a famous author, wondering about the ways fiction and reality overlap…”
“You have to prove your commitment to the students, but that commitment has to be to making them a better student not to changing them into something you think they should be.”
...moreFour hundred writers and readers celebrated one of the country’s favorite journals. Where were you?
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Patti Smith’s memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe chronicles two “mutinous spirits” in the chaos of 1970s New York.
“I don’t go down wrong paths, I’d rather stare at the screen and delete until I’ve put something down that is working. So, I don’t discard material; I don’t have a lot of false starts or unfinished stories or novels lying around.
Journalist Robert Sullivan often documents unlovely corners of the natural world: The Meadowlands (1998) turned a naturalist’s eye on a dispiriting region of northern New Jersey notable for its Mafia dumping grounds, while in Rats (2004) Sullivan gave Ratus norvegicus the Dian Fossey treatment.