The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
As always, here’s some very short stories that’ll only take you a few moments to read but that made me feel something and hopefully will do the same for you.
“The messages most people send are very simple.” — At jmww, “April 1854: Richard Word, 30” by Brian Kiteley.
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Happy day after America Day, everyone! I know it’s not Sunday, when I’m usually here, but I’m here today anyway—on a Monday—just to mess with your head. So here’s what Rumpus books was up to last week.
In curt sentences detailing many unsettled lives, Kim Chinquee constructs a mosaic of despair in modern day America. Life is already hard, but attempts at intimacy (what many of the people in these pages seek) do not always further the characters’ life but leaves them confused and sorry—sometimes stoic.
This week in New York Bill Gates talks with his dad, the Joan Rivers documentary screens, Christopher Hitchens talks about his new memoir, Isabella Rossellini talks to Leonard Lopate, KGB Bar holds a Fiction/Poetry slam, and Crispin Glover gives a unique slideshow presentation and screening.
This week in New York NOON launches Issue 9 with a reading and party, a reading by notable New Yorkers of stories on their first time in New York, Maile Chapman and Ethan Nosowsky converse, Synesthesia–a game of artistic telephone–begins, and PopRally helps you silksreen record sleeves while listening to Real Estate live.
Short fiction is often spoken of in terms of genre, a genre of ephemeral writing that is erased from the mind as quickly as it was most likely written. But the fallacy in this is that genre presupposes a style and tendency.