The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
The Violet Flowers Motel is located in Brantford, Ontario, and is considered by some to be home to drug dealing and prostitution; to others, the motel is the site of violent murders; some think it a nice place, just off the highway, to get a night’s rest.
...more“Québec has long been a holdout, but that era’s over. Which makes the students indisputedly right about one thing: the problem with ‘reforms’ like these is that they constitute an abandonment of that old saw, the projet de société.”
Over at The Awl, Rumpus Saturday editor Michelle Dean provides a lesson on the current protests in Québec.
...more
Hal Niedzviecki’s new collection, Look Down, This is Where it Must Have Happened, asks us what is essential to narrative.
The Rumpus assigned “dueling reviews” to the authors of two new short story collections. It didn’t really work out so well.Partially due to anti-porn Internet filters, the Canadian magazine The Beaver is changing its name. (via Silliman)
The end was near, and now it is near, and damn it, why won’t it just get here already. The Guardian writes on the history of apocalypses.
...moreThis week, the book blogs have went and gone political! Maybe it’s that it’s the off year in the election cycle and they miss the rabid infighting and corruption, or maybe it’s the news that the Kindle has already become the next thought police and will soon start force-feeding you Soma, but for some reason, politics are everywhere.
...moreBlogging and stillness seem to be contradictory activities: I, along with many others, think of blogging as the relentless and hasty documentation of modern life on the go, news-in-brief for busybusy people. And yet what bloggers are often attempting is to draw careful attention to the overlooked and underseen, to stop us in our tracks and make us wonder at what we might otherwise miss.
...more
In his introduction to the Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, Ben Marcus writes that the best contemporary fiction synthesizes the heartfelt and the innovative.
Chronic procastinators, who make up 20 per cent of the population, are more impulsive and erratic than other people and less conscientious about attention to detail and obligations to others, says Prof Piers Steel in his forthcoming book, The Procrastination Equation: Today’s Trouble with Tomorrow.
...more