The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
“At university in the early 1970s, I was led to believe the novel originated in England in the 18th century, and no professor told me otherwise as I pursued my PhD in the 1980s. Sometimes Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe was mentioned as a prototype, but according to literary dogma the novel experienced a kind of virgin birth with Pamela, Samuel Richardson’s epistolary novel of 1740.
...moreA judge decides that Kafka’s safe deposit box, which contains an unpublished short story, will be released instead of destroyed, as was stated in his will.
“Some things you just shouldn’t put in your head.” At The Morning News, one star reviews of literary classics.
...more“But for more than thirty years, the manuscript languished in literary purgatory, while the author struggled to find an agent—not to mention a publisher—willing to take it on.
Published in April as a collaboration between the California-based small press El León Literary Arts and Grove/Atlantic, the book—at nearly 650 pages, including a glossary—owes its existence to people in disparate pockets of the publishing industry, as well as to the extraordinary persistence of its sixty-five-year-old author.”
The new Poets And Writers is out and features a profile of Karl Marlante’s recent novel, Matterhorn, a Vietnam novel that took him half his life to get published.
...more“To sit down to read a novel is a mere fraction of the commitment required to write one, but in both cases the commitment must be made, and it needs to be driven by something very deep: What is essential about this story?
...more
We’re catching up with Shya Scanlon halfway through the serialization of his novel, Forecast, across 42 web journals and blogs.
The Rumpus: How is the serialization going? How are people responding to it? Are they following the novel across its different web outlets?
...moreThere is no place on earth like Los Angeles.
But everyone knows this.
Yet perhaps there is not a single place on earth where the end of the world will seem like just another fly-by-night off-off-Hollywood movie, screened in the dank interiors of an after-hours death rock club.
...more