The Daily Rumpus
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From Stephen Elliott
M. Bartley Seigel has a presence that fills a room. It is no surprise, then, that the prose poems in his debut collection, This Is What They Say, fill the page with a raw sense of place and longing, an undercurrent of anger and adulation
...moreIt’s been awhile since I’ve been a-Rumpusing, but I got this email from the talented Ashley Bethard thanking me for including her in an old Here Are Some Stories I Like link list, and I got to thinking about how much I loved doing those, so I asked Isaac if I could do them again, and he said yes.
...morePANK reviews Rumpus contributor Joseph Michael Owens’ Shenanigans!
“Whether centering on a nunchaku-wielding neighbor, the mistrust between man and his best friend over nail-clipping, or a wedding proposal that leads into buying more than a landlord-approved number of dogs that leads into a parental heart attack that into a personal unknown health threat, these stories bring forth life for me.”
...more“How to write sci-fi erotica: Imagine what Mary Shelley would write after fucking Pris from Blade Runner.” At PANK, Kirsty Logan wants to tell you how to write genre.
What are the scariest books you know of?
“One hit literary wonders” (via)
Why writers have to be careful when they talk.
...moreI get bored easily, so rather than the political links I usually run on Sundays, I’m gonna switch it up. Instead, here’s a list of five awesome and fun and weird and very short stories that I happened to come across while reading through some independent online lit mags, complete with a great sentence from each story.
...more“I feel that for writers, an obsession with what is elegant or what is a cliché or not a cliché can become very inhibiting.” Booker Prize winner Kazuo Ishiguro stands up for cliches. (via Bookninja)
“Laughs were out, torture porn was in.” Colin Bateman wonders what happened to humor in crime fiction.
...more“When a writer tells me they give up, or when they fatalistically declare they will never be published, I begin to understand how little people know about how publishing often works. One of the reasons I started the Q & A feature was to pull back that editorial curtain.
...moreMy relationship with the book blogs has hit a snag. Today, we got in a throw-down fight, and I came pretty close to breaking some china.
It’s just that the blogs whine and worry and complain a lot, and they always seem to want to cheat on me with famous writers, like Martin Amis or David Foster Wallace or Marquis de Sade, and then it rubs off on me, and I end up whining and worrying and complaining more than they do, and then I stop liking myself.
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