June

The Rumpus Book Club kicks off the summer with Alissa Nutting’s Tampa, “a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.”

The Poetry Book Club, meanwhile, has already received their copies of Brian Russell’s The Year of What Now. Glenn Shaheen interviewed Russell earlier this year about this manuscript.

July

For July, we’re very pleased to announce the Rumpus Book Club will feature David Gilbert’s And Sons, described as a “panoramic, deeply affecting story of an iconic novelist, two interconnected families, and the heartbreaking truths that fiction can hide.”

Our Poetry Book Club will read Anna Journey’s second collection, Vulgar Remedies. Check out this interview in the Kenyon Review between Journey and graduate students in the University of Arkansas’s MFA program.

August

We’ll close out the summer in the Book Club with Poe Ballantine’s Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere. Check out this piece on Ballantine’s experiences writing this book and being featured in a documentary on the subject.

And Poetry Book Club members will end the summer with a bang as well, with Brenda Hillman’s newest collection, Seasonal Works With Letters of Fire. It’s her ninth collection of poetry.

But not only will you get to read these fabulous books ahead of everyone else–all these books will be in your hands weeks before they’re in bookstores or online–if you join up now, you’ll get to talk about them online with a large group of committed, intelligent readers, and you’ll also get to chat personally with the authors online at the end of the month. What’s cooler than that?

I’d say something about operators standing by to take your calls, but really, who uses a phone as a phone anymore. I mean, you can use your phone to sign up for the book clubs, but you can also use your desktop/laptop/tablet for that as well. We’re not picky.

Related Posts:

• What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update
• A Rumpus Book Clubs Update
• A Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update
• The Daily Beast Loves The Rumpus Book Club
• A Rumpus Book Club Update

We’re very excited about this month’s books, in part because of what some of those even earlier readers have had to say about them. (Also, members already have their books and are devouring them.)

For instance, Jason Rice of 3 Guys, 1 Book has this to say about our fiction selection for this month, Elliott Holt’s You Are One of Them.:

Holt writes about the 80’s with a kind of ease that will make you long for those days where the world seemed to end, and then it didn’t. When U2 was breaking on the scene, and Sarah confuses their new album calling it November. I have enthusiastically dog-eared this book; every few pages there are these really amazing scenes about Sarah and Jennifer, where Holt describes friendship and childhood so perfectly. Do you remember when you were a kid and there were five hours until it got dark, and you were with your friends, that rush of excitement where you knew you were going to have a great time? That’s Sarah and Jennifer growing up. But then Jennifer got famous. They play hide and seek in the woods, and Sarah is left alone, and finally finds Jennifer, and there is this wonderful line at the end of the chapter about a swing coming to a stop while Sarah stands outside her friend’s house. It puts you right there next to her, so on the nose.

I’m loving this book so much I’m forcing myself to read it no more than two chapters at a time, because otherwise I’d be through it too quickly.

On the poetry side, we’re very excited to have Gregory Orr’s most recent collection, River Inside the River. Orr’s biography plays a huge role in this book (as in much of his work). David Rigsbee, writing for the Cortland Review, has this to say about Orr’s latest book:

With River Inside the River, Orr shows us that, move as he might out from the central events of his poetic life, his preference is to circle back to the ever-fecund wound and to find the pattern and path from personal to mythical, singular to plural; these movements also corresponded to the move from nonsense to sense.

I’ve been a fan of Orr and his work since he visited the University of Arkansas while I was an MFA student there in 2004. This is a book that rewards multiple readings, and I’m really looking forward to chatting with him at the end of the month.

There’s still time to join the book clubs and get this month’s books. Come join us!

Related Posts:

• The Rumpus Book Clubs Present: Summer Reading!
• Why I Chose Gregory Orr’s River Inside the River for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club
• A Rumpus Book Clubs Update
• A Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update
• The Daily Beast Loves The Rumpus Book Club

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month The Rumpus Book Club hosts a discussion online with the book club members and the author and we post an edited version online as an interview. To learn how you can become a member of The Rumpus Book Club click here.

This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Rebecca Rubenstein.

***

Brian S: So it’s the top of the hour—who wants to dive in with the first question?

Charlotte: Hi Emily! How are you doing?

Emily Rapp: Good! Hi! I mean, goodish.

Noah: How do you think the book would’ve been different if you’d written it after Ronan’s passing?

Emily Rapp: I think it would have had less urgency, because I was writing it facing an inevitable end, and I very much wanted the book to be about Ronan’s life, about what it meant to me, and I wanted him to be alive in the book when I looked at it years later.

Noah: That’s lovely. Have you read it again since it came out?

Emily Rapp: I have not read the book. It’s very hard for me to read it, in fact. I mean, since it came out. I’ve obviously read it.

Jack W.: One particular part that really resonated with me is when you wrote, “One thing I knew: Ronan would not, like Frankenstein’s monster, be sitting out in the middle of a dark forest, lonely, perched on a log and wishing somebody loved him. Not my boy.”

Emily Rapp: Thanks, Jack. That story was such a touchstone for me—this idea of a “wrongly made” man being cast out. It used to make me physically ill thinking about poor Frankie.

Anonymous Guest: Has any mom, whose son has been diagnosed, read the book? Or its first draft?

Emily Rapp: Yes, several moms read advance copies and sections of early drafts.

Anonymous Guest: I’m glad they got the chance to read something that was written by someone who went through the same things they did. What did they have to say about it?

Emily Rapp: The other moms were happy to have their story told, although obviously everyone’s story is different.

Charlotte: Did writing the book make you stronger while facing it all?

Emily Rapp: I wouldn’t say stronger. I would say it gave me a way to focus all my despair, rage, sadness—all of it. Tremendous focus. And putting words down and sending them out into the world was a nice antidote to wailing and hitting my head against the wall and being hysterical.

Brian S: How long ago did you finish the principal manuscript for the book, I mean before you did serious editing and proofing and all?

Emily Rapp: I finished the first draft of the book in November 2011, and then edited it for many, many months. Many agonizing months.

Brian S: Are there plans for you to do a book tour? Or is everything on hold right now?

Emily Rapp: No, there are plans. Book tour [started] March 6th.

Brian S: I really enjoyed the way you wove in other writers, quoting from them and then riffing off of them into your story. How did you come to that decision?

Emily Rapp: It happened naturally. Part of being a writer is being a reader, and the wisdom from other writers helped me hone my own ideas.

Brian S: So in a sense, this book is also a literary bio of you? You’re sort of giving us a glimpse into who you read and how they’ve affected you over your lifetime?

Emily Rapp: Yes.

Rebecca: This is tangentially related to an earlier question, but: what do you think this book would’ve been like if you’d waited to write it, say, twenty years afterward like Cheryl Strayed did with Wild? What would be different? What would be the same?

Emily Rapp: I think the grief would still be very much alive, but it would be qualitatively different if I had waited twenty years. Writing the book in the midst of the wild grief was an experience that was incredibly cathartic, and I hope I never have a similar experience again. It was tiring—exhausting, really—but absolutely necessary for me to survive the slow fade of Ronan’s life.

Rebecca: I totally understand that. I’ve been writing through a lot of pain in dealing with my father, and I always hear to have distance, but for me it’s cathartic and raw to write right now. I appreciate that about your memoir: it’s very raw. And I mean “raw” in a good way.

Emily Rapp: I think “raw” is a good term, but I will also say that I edited a lot, and I had a great editor.

Rebecca: Oh no, please don’t misunderstand: I know a lot of work went into it—a lot of revision. This is a beautiful, well-written, well-edited work. I just mean “raw” as in not numb, not dispassionate, not watered down. Strong.

Noah: Agreed. I love the anger that is present in it. You really beautifully rail against the obnoxious clichés associated with someone having a terminal disease.

Emily Rapp: I’m super angry. I’m still angry! I mean, not violently so, but yes, it’s hard to hear those clichéd statements that sound like someone knitted them on a napkin, and you’re holding your dying child in the marsupial pack at Trader Joe’s.

Noah: What do you do with that anger now?

Emily Rapp: I run. And do cross-fit. I abuse exercise machines.

Noah: Are you writing about Ronan’s passing now?

Emily Rapp: I am writing some about him, but not tons. He died February 15th, and I’ve been consumed with plans for his memorial, sorting through feelings, etc.

David B.: I thought your book was a guide for living.

Emily Rapp: Thanks, David. I learned so much about what it means to live a big, beautiful life from a child who never had the opportunity to make any choices in his own.

Anonymous Guest: Having followed your blog, I was surprised to find the book was placed in the past (past perfect?) tense. It felt like less of a chronicle, more of a looking-back. How was that editorial decision made?

Emily Rapp: I wrote the book in past tense because it already had such an urgent, breathless quality. It was too overwhelming in present tense in book form.

Noah: What made you want to end the book with the description of the dream sequence?

Emily Rapp: I wanted to end with a vision that had come to me often as a comfort. Something that paid homage to the idea of an afterlife without expressing any ardent belief in one, which I don’t have.

Brian S: When the club members first got the book, a number of us noted that we had a hard time reading in large chunks, myself included, because we had similar stories in our lives. My nephew died of SMA seven years ago, and for the first six to seven chapters, at least, whenever I saw Ronan, I saw my nephew as well. And I’m glad I kept going, because it reiterated a lot of what I felt, even from a distance, watching my nephew.

Emily Rapp: That’s interesting, and makes sense. It just goes to show that everyone has an experience of loss that guts them, changes them, whether it’s their own child, or a close friend’s child, or a parent, or a partner, or a friend.

Melissa: Yes, it was hard for me to reconcile the reader in me with the mother in me. I was dazzled by your beautiful way of storytelling, but I have to say it took everything in me to be able to read it. I cried pretty much the whole time.

Emily Rapp: I cried pretty much the whole time I wrote it, so I totally relate to that.

Melissa: But I will say that I truly feel like I will be a better parent because of you. And Ronan. So thank you.

Emily Rapp: Thanks, Melissa. Ronan was an incredible teacher in his way.

Noah: Surprisingly, and not to say I didn’t find it a sad experience, but the first time I cried was the very last paragraph of the Acknowledgements when you talked about your husband. And maybe it was because I could relate easier to Rick because he’s a male character, but every section with him was so hard for me.

Emily Rapp: Many people have said that same thing to me.

Noah: How did you decide what moments featuring your husband ended up in the book?

Emily Rapp: I looked at the narrative and figured out which moments were most salient. In terms of plot, because nonfiction also must have a plot!

Anonymous Guest: About this incredibly sad, truly heartbreaking experience you are going through now: is it similar to what you imagined (anticipated), or is it completely different? I’m talking about Ronan’s passing. You wrote a lot about this moment in the book—how you thought it would be, how much you feared it, dreaded it—and I wonder if any of those feelings were…accurate? (Such a bad word, but I can’t think of any other.) Could you have felt, back then, what you are feeling now?

Emily Rapp: I couldn’t have predicted how I felt after his passing. I felt relief that he was no longer suffering, and a deep fear of living the rest of my life never seeing him again.

Rebecca: What I really appreciated throughout the book was that you had this strong grief, this bullshit thing that was happening to Ronan, but you very much didn’t make your grief to be worse than anyone else’s. It always seems so empowering to be able to grieve but not make your grief worse than anyone else’s. And also made us relate more.

Emily Rapp: There is no grief ladder, truly, I believe this. Sadness is not qualitative, you know? It’s flat and intense and also unique to everyone.

Rebecca: I think that’s something I had to get older to learn—that grief wasn’t a ladder. I really appreciated that you wrote that.

Brian S: Yes, that there’s no hierarchy of pain.

Emily Rapp: Thanks. It took me a while, too.

Deborah: Totally loved your thoughts about the grief ladder. I lost a few young family members, including my sister, and found it so challenging not to feel, well, more hard done by, than someone facing another loss.

Rebecca: I also really liked that you were able to incorporate C.S. Lewis’s grief into your work even though you talk about not really believing in a god/afterlife the same as he does. Your vision was very inclusive of religion without buying into all of it.

Emily Rapp: I love that weird book Lewis wrote. It’s so wise and gripping, and it wrangles with issues without coming up with “answers,” which are always bunk.

David B: I read that C.S. Lewis book when my mother died. It was a help.

Willie: Jumping off of that: I found it very interesting when you wrote about C.S. Lewis’s belief that “it is impossible to truly care about the sorrows of the world until they are own,” while simultaneously reading this wonderful book about sorrows that were just that—not my own. Did that influence the way you approached writing the book?

Emily Rapp: I don’t know. It didn’t influence the way I wrote the book, but I certainly think that’s a wise and true statement.

Brian S: I identified a lot with your moments as a teenager in that Evangelical world. I was raised a Jehovah’s Witness (stayed one until my mid-twenties), but can so relate to those questions about healing and such. How long were you in that world, and how did you wind up leaving it behind?

Emily Rapp: I was in it to make friends, for about three months, and then I just couldn’t take it anymore. I love the study of religion, but I’ve never been so into the practice of it.

Brian S: Ha! I feel that way now.

Anonymous Guest: Were you ever in trouble with your parents (your father) for not practicing it?

Emily Rapp: No, my dad is a very cool dude.

Melissa: It must have been a very, very difficult task to edit this book. To have to guide you in how to tell this intensely personal story.

Emily Rapp: I actually welcomed my editor’s thoughts because she’s a genius and she totally got what I was doing. We had a weird mind-meld.

Anonymous Guest: Which one was harder, writing it or editing it?

Emily Rapp: Writing. Absolutely.

Rebecca: What do you feel like your narrative arc is? It’s not a Freitag’s pyramid, I think. But maybe more like a snake? What was your vision of plot?

Emily Rapp: I wanted the book to have a nine month arc, for obvious reasons, and I wanted people to see Ronan and to witness how my moments with him transformed me, and others as well.

David B: I’m reading your first book now and loving it.

Emily Rapp: Thanks, David.

David B: Like Brian, I enjoyed the authors you mentioned who gave you inspiration.

Charlotte: I wrote down all the writers you mentioned and I am inspired to re-read or try somebody new…grew up in Sweden. Loved the way you incorporated them all.

Emily Rapp: Writers must read! This is essential. You can’t write well if you don’t read a ton. I believe that.

Brian S: Who are you reading lately?

Emily Rapp: I’m reading a book of stories by my friend Betsy Brandt. And We the Animals by Justin Torres.

Deborah: I love We the Animals! I read it right after your book. Wonderful together.

Emily Rapp: It’s a great, slim, deliciously brilliant book.

Noah: Do you still read philosophy, Emily?

Emily Rapp: I do in spurts. I read philosophy when I’m blocked as a writer, because it’s like doing gymnastics with your brain. Loosens stuff up.

Anonymous Guest: I cried a lot when I read that on the day Ronan was diagnosed, you called your parents every ten minutes for seven hours until they finally got to your place. It is the same thing, the first thing I would have done. I’m glad they were there for you.

Emily Rapp: They were very present with me throughout this journey.

Noah: Has your husband read the book?

Emily Rapp: I’m not sure. Rick and I are no longer married, and I think his experience is very private to him. He was a wonderful father to Ronan.

Noah: It’s interesting to be asking questions about a memoir, because it makes me, at least, feel like I know you on a more personal level than I actually do. I keep writing questions and then deleting them because they seem intrusive.

Deborah: Me too, Noah.

Willie: I agree Noah—and on the other end, nerdy, writerly questions feel a bit cold.

Brian S: That’s something the book also did for me—helped me really understand why the things we say are empty. I mean, I’d always known they felt like they weren’t enough, but I get why now.

Emily Rapp: I think that’s part of writing memoir—I feel the same way when I read other memoirs. I think part of this is that when you read a book, the person is frozen in time, but in reality, they’re a person who is moving on with their life, changing, growing, moving along in the time-space continuum. It’s like watching a movie and then seeing the celebrity on a talk show, and feeling weirded out that their hair is fourteen inches longer or something. Lots of distance between the process and the person.

Ana: One part that interested me was a bit where you talked about other people’s invasive stare and categorization of the lady on the the plane as a freak—the “big reveal” of our otherness, or our wounds. You’ve put so much out there, on the page. Do you feel a bit naked—or a bit lighter—when the knowledge precedes you? Or is it entirely different?

Emily Rapp: I do have a lot out there, but it’s controlled, edited and polished. Memoirists are actually private. If someone asks me, “What was it like to have a dying child?” I can hand them the book, but those are the things I have decided to share. Other things will stay private.

Noah: Have you done other publicity events since Ronan passed?

Emily Rapp: No. I’m in the process of moving house, believe it or not. So I’ve been going to Goodwill and packing boxes of shoes.

Noah: How are you feeling about the book tour?

Emily Rapp: I want to share this book with the world. I’m very motivated to do that, because Ronan was such a huge teacher for me, and as I’ve said, for others. I will say that the last time I was on book tour, someone came to a reading and thought I was the cookbook author. So I hope that doesn’t happen again, since I can hardly pour milk over cereal in an efficient way.

Brian S: Ha!

Jack W.: Has your writing method changed in the past few years? Ie the feverish writing you mention from your time at Yaddo when you were pregnant? Are the things you plan on writing henceforth altered?

Emily Rapp: My writing method has changed a lot. I used to whine and groan a lot about the writing process, and now I have no time or space for that. I write with intention, and I don’t have patience for my neurosis. It’s a relief.

Melissa: At what point did you choose the title, and why? It’s perfect, by the way. I love Eliot.

Emily Rapp: My editor helped with the title! I wanted Dear Dr. Frankenstein, but we ended up thinking that it didn’t say enough about what the book is about.

Melissa: Would you consider selling the rights for a film, if approached about it?

Emily Rapp: I don’t know, Melissa. That had never even crossed my mind.

Rebecca: I have questions relating to this being a memoir. What do you say when someone says they can’t approach this memoir critically because it’s about your life? I mean, there’s that famous V.S. Pritchett quote, “It’s all in the art. You get no credit for living.” Do you give someone a pass for saying that? Do you welcome the criticism, given that it’s about this book that is so very personal and yet so polished.

Emily Rapp: I welcome criticism as much as any writer, because I’ve made what I consider to be a piece of art. I don’t think you get credit for living, but i do think you should want to be, as a writer, part of trying to make meaning from chaos.

Rebecca: I totally understand that. I write creative nonfiction, and I really dislike when someone says that about memoir—that they can’t pull it apart because it’s someone’s life.

Emily Rapp: It’s a story, pure and simple, in my mind. If people don’t like the way it’s told, that’s fair. If they don’t like the person or the subject matter, that’s not criticism, it’s more of a kneejerk opinion. In my opinion.

Noah: Do you think you’ll continue writing as a memoirist? Is there a novel or a book of short stories kicking around in there?

Emily Rapp: I’m working on a novel.

Noah: Why the decision to jump from memoir to novel?

Emily Rapp: I started as a fiction writer, in fact, and I’m very jazzed about this book. And it’s a very different experience from memoir writing, and as you know, writers crave novelty!

Brian S: So you’re saying after the novel, a book of poems?

Emily Rapp: I wish. I love poetry, but no dice, I think. I write one semi-decent poem once a year, usually in January or February. That’s all I’ve got.

Rebecca: Have you heard about Poetry Lent? Heather Sellers does it every year, to give out instead of take away. I tried it. It’s…hard.

Emily Rapp: Ooh—no. I will look that up!

Rebecca: The idea is just to write a poem every day. It’s on the Brevity blog.

Brian S: Oh, like the poem-a-day thing for National Poetry Month.

Rebecca: Apparently she said it’s what started a piece she got published in Brevity.

Emily Rapp: Interesting. I’ve done Tony Hoagland’s “Five Powers of Poetry” class, which was fantastic. Poetry boot camp.

Rebecca: Ooh. I’ll have to look that one up and do it.

Brian S: Are you still teaching in Santa Fe?

Emily Rapp: I’m on leave this term, but yes, I’m still at Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Noah: Did your separation from Rick affect his presence in the book at all?

Emily Rapp: Not really. I think he is very present as a father to Ronan in the book. Ultimately, though, I think the book is about my experience, and because every grief experience is different, and because it’s not a book about our marriage, his presence is mitigated by those factors. I mean his narrative presence, to be clear.

Noah: I actually really appreciated that about the book, it had a sort of cast of characters, but the book was your story. You didn’t try to explain how other people grieved.

Emily Rapp: Grief is so personal, and yet everyone will experience it. Strange.

Noah: It’s always amazing to me that grief is really something that we will all face in our lives and when we’re growing up, learning up on wars and algebra, no one ever thinks to do some general description of the generic grieving process.

Emily Rapp: I agree. We need a lesson in grief. My friend Gareth wrote a guest blog for me about that very thing.

Noah: Just like a, “Heads up, this is going to happen and it’s going to be really, really hard.”

Emily Rapp: Exactly.

Rebecca: I used to teach at my university as a grad student, and turning thirty was really hard for me—all sorts of awful things happening, not even related to my age—and my students would say, “Something has happened to you.” And I wanted to tell them that things would change as they got older, that the hurts would pile up, that they would really grieve. But I didn’t know how.

Deborah: Nothing prepares one.

Brian S: Because so much of what we do get about grief is, as you put it, ultimately empty.

Emily Rapp: Yes, true. People are so afraid of death. If we were less death-phobic, we’d know how to “do” grief better, I think. Or differently, at the very least.

Noah: Yes! I loved, loved your idea about a Day of Mourning.

Brian S: Yes! Although I noticed that when you described the Day of Mourning cards, you didn’t have birds on them. Fucking birds.

Noah: Death is a terrible thing, but an inevitable thing, so why not make it part of our existence?

Emily Rapp: We have a kind of Day of Mourning at the Tay-Sachs family conference. Very powerful.

Willie: Well, in terms of being death-phobic, that gets back to the Montaigne quote that learning how to live is about learning how to die.

Melissa: Well, and on another note, I wish someone would tell you how fucking judgmental other mothers can be when you have a child who is late on milestones.

Brian S: How judgmental other parents can be, period.

Emily Rapp: Seriously. The “smug mother” syndrome. Unlike button. Children are people, not projects. Some parents don’t realize this sometimes. It makes me sad for everyone involved.

Melissa: It’s awful. It’s something I never expected. I imagined I would connect so easily with other mothers. Not so. A-holes.

Rebecca: I really liked how much you talked about how goal-oriented parents are, how much of parenting is about the future and future accomplishments. It made me re-think parenting, if I ever were to become a parent. I want to put the book in the hands of every parent I know.

Emily Rapp: Yes. None of us knows what the future holds. To think that we do is just, well, wrong. And I think it blocks us from fully living and making choices that make us (and hopefully others) happy. I’ve been to such a sad place, such a despairing place, that I feel like my gift to Ronan is to live a big, beautiful life. For him, because of him, in honor of him.

Deborah: You will, Emily.

Brian S: And when you spend your life, as I did until my mid-twenties, planning for a future existence beyond this one, it cripples your ability to live in this one.

Emily Rapp: Yes, no more future existence. I could log off this chat and get hit by a car. Anything can happen. That’s a terrifying thought, as well as a liberating reality. I think.

Brian S: I think the piece of knowledge that really did it for me was learning about the future death of the universe. No matter how immortal I could potentially make myself, eventually this is all going to end.

Emily Rapp: And maybe the end is the beginning? Nobody knows. I am, however, planning to go have a nice Italian dinner with one of my closest friends.

Brian S: Mmmm. Italian.

Jack W.: Mmmmm. Entropy.

Emily Rapp: Nothing better than butter and oil and bread. And wine. All on one table.

Donna: Did you realize at some point the blog was really a book, or was it all just writing, writing, writing? It seems like there would be a major difference between writing for a small community of friends and a manuscript, but your blog was like few others.

Emily Rapp: My friends told me I was writing a book. I was writing those blog posts because it was a way of staying alive and connected and I couldn’t always talk to people on the phone.

Rebecca: I’m glad you listened to your friends.

Noah: Agreed. I also loved your thoughts on good and bad luck.

Brian S: Yes! Luck has long seemed to me as a substitute for being blessed (or not), and I was glad to see you pair them.

Emily Rapp: Thanks. I think luck is such a dubious term. I go around and around in my head about that one.

Noah: Yeah, luck is like religion for us atheists.

Emily Rapp: I don’t like the idea of being “blessed,” either. I think it’s great to be grateful and happy about certain things in your life, but who is doing the blessing? We use it a lot in secular culture, when it’s actually a very religious term.

Brian S: Yeah. I mean it’s good to acknowledge that there are things that just happen, good and bad, which are out of your control. You wind up like a character in an Ayn Rand novel if you believe chance has nothing to do with outcomes.

Emily Rapp: Think of it this way: Ronan was horribly unlucky because he hardly had a chance to live before he died, and he experienced suffering. On the other hand, we’re all going to die, and he was completely and wonderfully and fiercely loved. So there you go.

Rebecca: Very true. That was a very powerful thing to think about in the beginning of your book.

Emily Rapp: Although one can study religion and not be religious. Like, at all.

Noah: What draws you to the study of religion?

Emily Rapp: Religion is a nice blend of history, philosophy and literature. All of my favorite nerdbag things.

Rebecca: One of my best friends went to Vanderbilt’s Divinity School and was surrounded by atheists, Mormons, and very devout Christians. They instructed everyone there to call God “Her.”

Brian S: Really? Vanderbilt?

Rebecca: Yep.

Brian S: That place just rose in my estimation.

Melissa: My best friend’s mom was on her way to an A.A. meeting and was going to make them change the Our Father to Our Mother, but a bird came crashing into her windshield before she got there. True story.

Emily Rapp: Wow.

Rebecca: I once sat next to a man on a plane who was Christian. I told him my best friend was going to Vanderbilt Divinity School, and he narrowed his eyes and told me that it did “bad things” to Christians.

Emily Rapp: Ooh!

Noah: Wow.

Emily Rapp: Divinity school gossip!

Rebecca: Ha!

Brian S: Something I had no idea even existed.

Emily Rapp: Indeed.

Rebecca: I was wondering if Harvard was similar in some ways?

Emily Rapp: Harvard was. People were very thoughtful and interesting there.

Willie: Now let’s just wait for a divinity school to refer to God as “phe.”

Brian S: What does divinity school smack talk sound like?

Emily Rapp: Hmmm. Div school smack. Well, we used to covet the cafeteria at the Business School. Sinful!

Brian S: “You can’t even read Aramaic!”

Emily Rapp: “Jesus spoke Coptic! For reals!”

Brian S: Yes!

Emily Rapp: I was in a cubicle most of the time, attempting to read Aramaic. Or something like that.

Brian S: I learned the Greek alphabet when I was an undergrad—part of a fraternity thing. That’s as far as I go.

Noah: Brian, I’m proud that you just fessed up to fraternity life. How’s the party scene at divinity school?

Emily Rapp: Lots of beer. True story.

Brian S: As well there should be.

Rebecca: “Those Div School kids know how to party!”

Willie: Party scene in the Bible > party scene in div school.

Emily Rapp: It’s hard to study God. One needs a bit of relaxation at the end of the day.

Brian S: And in the beginning, I might think.

Rebecca: I would’ve thought wine for div school.

Emily Rapp: Or just water. Spiked water. That converts to wine with very deep thinking.

***

Related Posts:

• A Rumpus Book Clubs Update
• The Rumpus Book Clubs Present: Summer Reading!
• Weekend Rumpus Roundup
• The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Emily Rapp
• What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update

We’re pleased to announce that our February selection for the Rumpus Book Club is Emily Rapp’s The Still Point of the Turning World. Publishers Weekly had this to say about it.

Her elegant, restrained work flows with reflections and excerpts from writers and poets like Mary Shelley, Pablo Neruda, and Sylvia Plath, as well as supporters who helped her during the difficult unraveling of her son’s condition. Writing about Ronan allowed her to claim the sorrow and truly look at her son the way he was. Her narrative does not follow Ronan as far as his death, but gleans lessons from Buddhism and elsewhere in order that Rapp could “walk through this fire without being consumed by it.”

The Poetry Book Club will be reading Kate Greenstreet’s Young Tambling, which Greenstreet describes as “an experimental memoir.” The Ahsahta Press website says this about Young Tambling:

Greenstreet does not dabble in teleological platitudes: the lives crosscutting these poems are not singular but plural and sublime, full of sacrifice and empathy for the lost. In Young Tambling, a life’s meaning is born of its poet’s song, and a memory cannot reveal its truth until it finds its ballad.

We’re also excited to announce that our March selection for the Book Club will be Matthew Spektor’s American Dream Machine, out from Tin House on April 9 (that’s right–members get the book a month before anyone else does). And our Poetry Book Club selection will be Lynn Xu’s Debts and Lessons, out from Omnidawn Books April 1.

In other book club news, T Cooper, author of November selection Real Man Adventures is on tour right now. He’s in Nashville tomorrow and Asheville on Saturday with special guests Peg Hambright (at both shows) and Clay Aiken in Asheville. Check the website for future dates in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Coldfront Mag is currently listing their 40 best books of poetry from 2013. They’ve only released numbers 21-40 so far, but it’s nice to see Rumpus Poetry Book Club selectee The Ground by Rowan Ricardo Phillips come in at number 33. We expect to see other books we’ve read appear in the top 20.

Why wouldn’t you want to be a member of one or both of these book clubs? Click here to join.

Related Posts:

• A Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update
• The Rumpus Book Clubs Present: Summer Reading!
• What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Camille Guthrie
• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with Emily Rapp

This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month The Rumpus Book Club hosts a discussion online with the book club members and the author and we post an edited version online as an interview. To learn how you can become a member of The Rumpus Book Club click here.

This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Lauren O’Neal.

***

Brian S: Well, it’s the top of the hour. Who has a question or comment for Manuel?

Noah Sanders: I loved the fantastical worlds that your stories lived in. When you read, do you read fantasy and sci-fi?

Brian S: Something I’ve been wondering: What made you decide to use genre fiction elements in these stories, particularly the horror motifs? I’m glad to see it, because I think genre fiction gets treated unfairly by critics and “serious” writers.

Melissa Stuart: I also want to know who your favorite writers are. Your stories are so unique, and yet I see little hints of some of my favorite writers.

Roxane: Hi all, Manuel. One of the things I loved was the balance between the plausible and the implausible. How did you make those decisions about where to push the boundaries?

Brian S: Answer these as you can. If you have to skip something, we understand. These things can get out of hand sometimes.

Manuel Gonzales: When I was younger, I read a lot of sci-fi and fantasy, and my television tastes run to sci-fi and fantasy, though the light stuff. Now I read a lot of everything. I just read Mark Binelli’s Detroit City Is the Place to Be, which is kind of like dystopian fiction, and I love Borges and Nabokov—the regulars. George Saunders and David Mitchell and Jennifer Egan. I wrote an essay for NPR’s “You Must Read This” about The Princess Bride, which I still love. But then I also really enjoy something quiet and serious, like the short stories of Ian McEwan, etc.

Brian S: The Princess Bride the film, or the novel, or both?

Manuel Gonzales: I love both, but I wrote the essay about the book, which not many people have read, and which is weird and funny.

Brian S: I fell in love with the movie first but discovered the novel when Spider Robinson excerpted the duel on the Cliffs of Doom for a sci-fi anthology when I was a teenager.

Manuel Gonzales: Roxane, I love the idea of trying to take something weird and implausible and making it not only believable but kind of understated, so that it can, if possible, fall to the background for a lot of the story, and then rear its head again toward the end. I do a lot of trial and error, though, when deciding when things have been pushed too far. And usually it has less to do with the weirdness or implausibility, and more to do with the story as a whole—something about the character or the pacing doesn’t work, and sometimes it leads me back to the world and its rules, which I then tweak.

Pia: And when have things been pushed too far? Do you have an inner gauge?

Noah Sanders: Do you create the rules of each little world your stories take place in first? Or do they develop as you write?

Hannah Kaufman: I wanted to know why you chose to write about zombies. They are so pervasive in our culture right now. Why do you think that is? And what made you enter the fray?

Manuel Gonzales: The zombie stories: the first one I wrote ages ago, just on the cusp or right before the cusp of all the zombie stuff happening (“All of Me”), and then a former agent I was working with never did anything with it, and I didn’t either, and then it ended up in this collection because I really liked it. The other one came about because I was teaching high-school English and felt like I was trapped inside an institutionalized building surrounded by soul-crushing tenth graders and needed an escape.

What’s interesting is that I usually don’t change the weirdness or implausible quality of a thing when rewriting a story, but how it’s couched. Because, I don’t know, I have a guy in a plane for at least twenty years, and that was the idea from the beginning, and it never varied. I have a guy who talks out of his ears, and what I did to make that work was create this long, medically languaged riff about how he could talk through his ears, and then immediately following that, have another character call bullshit, because of course any sane person would, but then have that character who is now believable because he called bullshit on something you thought was bullshit come back around and say, But, yeah, it’s true. Bastard talks through his ears.

And usually the rules are built as the story is being built.

Hannah Kaufman: A comment: I appreciated how the supernatural never seemed to detract from the story. Each world seemed completely legitimate.

Noah Sanders: Agreed. The rules of each story were so perfectly constructed and adhered to.

Melissa Stuart: I agree with Hannah. I somehow accepted each one right way, without the need for a moment to settle in. You do that very well.

Manuel Gonzales: Thanks. That’s really important to me, that the reader accept the premise.

Melissa Stuart: That first story reminded me a bit of Saramago—how so many tales are told in a tiny little space/world.

Manuel Gonzales: That’s nice. I love Saramago. He is a master at creating worlds with specific and compelling rules.

Brian S: The speculative fiction I enjoyed most when I was younger always had that adherence to a set of rules. That was the deal I felt I was making with the author: you can take me somewhere weird, as long as the rules hold together.

Manuel Gonzales: Well, when I teach, that’s one of the things I tell students. The world can be completely imagined, but it must have its own physics, then, its own biology, its own rules. You don’t have to give them all away, but you need to know them and adhere to them, and when you break them, do so deliberately for a good reason.

Roxane: World building is so important. I’m glad to hear you talk about that, because I think it applies to all writers, regardless of genre.

Noah Sanders: Are there premises you’ve toyed with but then backed away from?

Manuel Gonzales: There are premises I’ve toyed with but haven’t been able to work out yet. But they’re still in my head. There was one I have completely let go of, in which a man and his wife communicate through the clothes they wear, except you realize that the man does this, not so much his wife.

Noah Sanders: Why did you decide to release that one?

Manuel Gonzales: Noah, I couldn’t get the narrator right, couldn’t find the right tone, and worked and reworked it out of something I wanted to work on anymore.

Brian S: Where did the idea for “Life on Capra II” come from? I recognized the moment when the character gets stuck outside the game from the times that happened to me when I played Medal of Honor (my one first-person shooter experience).

Hannah Kaufman: Oh, I wondered if Capra was a video game!

Manuel Gonzales: Ha. Brian, I didn’t even know you could get a character stuck outside a game. That’s awesome. The story started as a way to get me out of a rut. I was rewriting a thing that refused to be rewritten, and I decided to write the first sentence because it was ridiculous and completely removed from what I was working on. Then, months later, I came back to that first paragraph and thought, “What story would that thing exist in?”

Brian S: Seriously? That’s amazing. As a player, on the rare occasions when it happened, I’d have to just start the level over. Most of the time, it involved me getting stuck in a wall.

Manuel Gonzales: That makes me exceedingly happy, Brian. (Not that you were stuck in a wall, mind you.) And Roxane, I agree. It’s key to writers of any genre. Any world, whether realistic or fantastic, needs its rules, and those rules can be broken, but not because you didn’t know them.

Brian S: Something I wanted to do but ran out of time was to reread the “Meritorious Life” stories on their own and see if they held together in some way, but I’m going to ask instead if that’s how you came up with them.

Noah Sanders: I loved that idea, Brian.

Manuel Gonzales: They were written originally as one story, but not all of the ones in the book were in that original story, and not all from the original made it into the book. And they were originally “An Illustrated Chronicle of Meritorious Lives,” and were accompanied by weird, disparate images from old textbooks and medical books I’d find in the library.

Brian S: Oh, that sounds like an awesome idea.

Melissa Stuart: Indeed.

Manuel Gonzales: It was short enough that it worked okay. I think something like that that goes on too long can become, without an obvious thread that connects them, difficult to pay attention to. I also like that they’re broken up here, because the language in them—which can be similar, because they’re kind of encyclopedia entries—is broken up too.

Noah Sanders: Do you have a journalistic background, Manuel? It felt like a lot of the stories had first-person narrators who were New Journalism reporters.

Manuel Gonzales: I don’t, Noah, but always wanted to have a strength as a journalist. One of my favorite writers is Joseph Mitchell, who wrote profiles for the New Yorker, and Ian Frazier, whose essay “Canal Street” for the New Yorker is one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. And so, since I like that style so much, but am better at making stuff up, I thought I’d play around with the style paired with fiction. Usually, outlandish fiction.

Hannah Kaufman: Have you always been more inclined to write short stories? Or is a novel in the works?

Noah Sanders: I’m curious about that, too. So many of these stories seem ripe to expand upon.

Manuel Gonzales: I’m in the second draft of a novel, and before returning to stories, spent about six years writing and rewriting a novel that still hasn’t played out yet.

Hannah Kaufman: Is the novel a similar genre?

Manuel Gonzales: The novel I’m in right now plays with some similar genre themes, mostly the super-secret agency or organization peopled by superpowered female heroines, à la Alias or Buffy or Dollhouse. But not exactly that, either. And then the other novel played more with the journalism-styled pieces.

Noah Sanders: It also felt like your stories were steeped in a cinematic language. Are you a film buff?

Hannah Kaufman: Or TV?

Manuel Gonzales: I wouldn’t say buff. I like movies, and I like TV, and I like all those tropes, but I also like to mess them up.

Brian S: One of the other things I enjoyed in this book was the way you subverted the things we thought we knew—like the unicorn, for example. Especially the way it affected the men and didn’t look like a unicorn and was, well, a dick.

Manuel Gonzales: I know. That unicorn was such an asshole.

Noah Sanders: Yeah, the image of it spearing the mailboxes as it ran away still makes me chuckle.

Manuel Gonzales: I still think that one of my better ideas was that what you feed unicorns is ground-up fairies. Mixed with beer.

Brian S: That was pretty awesome.

Noah Sanders: That it actually won’t drink ground up fairies mixed with water—just alcohol.

Hannah Kaufman: I wanted to know what they would have done when they ran out of fairies to feed it.

Sky: Several of the stories take place in Texas or have characters that come from Texas cities and universities (once even mentioning Whataburger!). Is this simply because you live in Texas now, or is there another reason Texas locales so often appeared?

Manuel Gonzales: I grew up in Texas, mostly, and so it’s a landscape and people that I’m very comfortable with, which makes it easier for me to create a scene, create a place that feels—to me, anyway—imaginable and believable.

Noah Sanders: Did you have an idea of what job Ralph was going out to get?

Manuel Gonzales: Oh, just an office job, any kind of job. The idea always being that he could have, any time, gotten this sort of job and done well enough in it but never did because he hated the idea of that life. I was thinking specifically, though, of a job I had for a year working in a commercial property development office here in Austin after I left college.

Noah Sanders: Did you see the two stories about zombies existing in the same zombie-plagued world?

Manuel Gonzales: After I wrote the second one, kind of, but nothing too specific. Because also, I wanted the second, “Escape from the Mall,” to encompass any kind of sci-fi disaster: Godzilla, zombies, alien invasions.

Noah Sanders: I would love to see a Godzilla story written by you.

Hannah Kaufman: I almost wish “Escape from the Mall” didn’t have a named enemy. I like that it could have been any sci-fi disaster.

Manuel Gonzales: A Godzilla story would be fun. I don’t know what I’d do with it, though. I think that’s also a thing. When playing with these genre ideas, I want to have something specific I want to toy around with. “All of Me,” I wanted to tell a story from the zombie’s point of view and then make you want to root for him, and then also have it end really the only way a zombie story of that nature could end. Whereas with “Escape,” I wanted to play around with those peripheral characters in sci-fi disaster movies who always die and are never the heroes.

Brian S: I Googled William Corbin of the “Meritorious Life” stories and discovered that there was a man of that name who was important enough to get a Wikipedia entry. He “invented” paper towels.

Manuel Gonzales: What? Brian, dude, you are blowing my mind. How did anyone invent paper towels, A, and why didn’t I think to Google people I named my characters after?

Brian S: Have you read John Scalzi’s Redshirts? He toys around with that idea of the secondary sci-fi character who gets killed all the time as well.

Noah Sanders: When I was reading “All of Me,” I spent a lot of time wondering where that zombie got his makeup from and how early he had to wake up to apply it.

Manuel Gonzales: Those are very good questions, Noah. And I’ve heard good things about but haven’t read Redshirts yet.

Brian S: Is there a reading tour in the works?

Manuel Gonzales: A bit of a tour, yes. I’ll be hitting a few places in Texas—Austin, to start, and then Dallas the next day, and then New York after that, then LA, and then back to Texas for a thing in Houston and another Austin gig, and then to New Orleans for the Tennessee Williams Lit Fest.

Noah Sanders: What was the inspiration for “Cash For A Killing”? It seemed just a little bit outside of the rest of the stories.

Brian S: That was one of my favorites, by the way. I loved the way it kept escalating even when you thought it couldn’t go any further.

Noah Sanders: I loved the idea of a meticulous planned killing ground. It was so delightfully evil.

Manuel Gonzales: That one was a thing for Esquire. When they hired a new fiction editor, he sent out cocktail napkins and asked writers to write a full story on a cocktail napkin, and I toyed around with a lot of ideas before, for some reason, that line about a hamburger after burying the body came to me, and with that first line, that guy came into focus for me.

It’s funny you think it’s evil. I mean, it is, it is evil, but I also think it’s weird and goofy that he would have a grid, which seems meticulous, but that he would also mess up his own grid, which seems the opposite.

Brian S: He’s an evil subgenius.

Noah Sanders: Just a few IQ points shy of true evil brilliance. You ever have thoughts about just doing a straight-up crime novel?

Manuel Gonzales: I tried one once, and I think I’d do a better job of it now, but I didn’t have any idea what it was about and was stuck with just the voice. In fact, I have an idea that’s a crime novel in structure but that will also subvert that genre that I want to start working on.

Brian S: That’s the real key, isn’t it? To subvert the genre, do something unexpected with it.

Noah Sanders: Do you read a lot of crime fiction?

Manuel Gonzales: I read a little. Not a lot. I cherry pick crime and fantasy and sci-fi and spy-thriller writers.

Noah Sanders: Genre is great, because it offers you this entrenched structure that you can just squish into whatever amazing shape you want.

Manuel Gonzales: That’s what makes it fun, as a writer, at least. Subverting it, playing around with these ideas we all recognize.

Noah Sanders: It’s guiding and freeing all at the same time.

Manuel Gonzales: You have to be careful, though, Noah, because if you lead people to believe what you’re writing is a crime novel, they’ll expect a crime novel and those enthusiasts will feel let down.

And Hannah, if you’re still here, I just saw your comment about the unnamed evil in “Escape.” I like that idea, too, and I tried to imply that it could have been any evil disaster, because those characters and the situation they’re in—it’s all kind of stock, right? But somewhere along the line, I felt I had to show what the evil was, and when I did that, it coalesced.

Jack W: Manuel, “The Artist’s Voice” kicked so much ass that I accidentally reread it four times and have not finished the rest of the stories as a result (yet cannot wait to finish the rest).

Manuel Gonzales: That’s hilarious, Jack, and thanks, and I hope you like the rest of them as much or nearly so.

Brian S: “The Artist’s Voice” struck me at first as very similar to one of Oliver Sacks’s case studies, like from The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.

Ana: I liked the stories playing with marriage. I’ve cited the dirty-dishes-by-the-bed incident to a few friends. Where did that come from? Also, on that note, did your wife have any thoughts on “The Miniature Wife”?

Manuel Gonzales: Ana, all the domestic stuff comes from just being domestic. And that dirty-dishes-by-the-bed thing happened when I was in college and was living with a friend and his girlfriend. I won’t say she was or wasn’t OCD about things, but I’ll also own up to being a lousy roommate while I was in college.

By “being domestic,” I mean a lot of it comes from stuff that happens in our home, or that’s something not far from what could happen in our home. Mostly, I hyperbolize the mistakes I feel I’ve made as a husband or friend or whatever and turn those into stories. And my wife is a bit upset by the title, The Miniature Wife, because she’s petite and feels people will think it’s a direct reference to her.

Brian S: About five minutes left—any lurkers want to get in a question?

Jack W: Are any of the characters from The Miniature Wife going to appear in future works? We were introduced to so many wonderful characters.

Brian S: I also want to say that “The Animal House” gave me a bad dream or two. As did “Wolf.”

Amy C: Just a comment from me. Like Jack, I found it hard to move on to the next story. Every time. Each one was fantastic, and even though I was anxious for the next one, I found I needed to absorb it before moving to the next one. It made for a wonderful month of reading—thank you.

Noah Sanders: Was it coincidental that in “Farewell, Africa” and “The Disappearance of the Sebali Tribe,” the narrator and female lead seemed to be romantically connected?

Manuel Gonzales: I’ve had lingering ideas about some characters (Denise from “Sebali”) and some situations (Klouns) that I might toy around with in the future. At one point, I had this idea of writing a fake biography of Abbasonov and having a musician friend of mine write fake scores for it, but that hasn’t happened. Yet.

Ann: I had trouble letting go of the characters.

Manuel Gonzales: Thanks, Amy and Ann. That’s nice to hear. It’s strange to me that black and white symbols on a page can become so much, but I love it when it happens to me as a reader, and it’s stunning to think that something similar happened to you.

In my mind, Noah, the guy who wrote those—as well as “Artist’s Voice”—is kind of the same guy, and the girl, though different in “Sebali” and “Africa,” is kind of the same girl.

Noah Sanders: Awesome. That connection adds so much to the stories for me.

Brian S: Any chance you’ll be at AWP in Boston this year?

Manuel Gonzales: I don’t know yet. I’m running around a lot this winter/spring and am leaving my wife in the lurch with the kids for an amount of time that makes me uncomfortable, so it’s still in the air, AWP.

Roxane: That is romantic!

Manuel Gonzales: Also, Brian, glad to have affected your dreams.

Brian S: Thanks for joining us tonight, Manuel. Loved the book. If you make it to Boston, make sure to stop by our table.

Noah Sanders: Thank you so much, Manuel. Thank you, Brian, for organizing all this.

Brian S: And thanks to everyone else for your great questions.

Manuel Gonzales: I will, Brian. Thanks for having me. This was a great time, and I appreciate all the love and support from the Rumpus and its readers.

Jack W: Abbasanov, to me, is Stephen Hawking + Brahms + Joan of Arc. Thanks for opening up many worlds to us, Manuel. I look forward to following your career.

Manuel Gonzales: No, thank you. I’m glad you all enjoyed the stories.

Brian S: Good night, everyone!

Manuel Gonzales: Good night.

Related Posts:

• A Rumpus Book Club Special Offer/Update
• The Rumpus Book Clubs Present: Summer Reading!
• What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update
• New Fiction Confab on 4/13
• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion with Emily Rapp

Well, we might start giving away a free copy of one of those past selections to anyone who signs up for the Rumpus Book Club or Poetry Book Club. (If you sign up for both, I’ll send you two free books!) This is only while supplies last.

This month, the fiction club is reading Manuel Gonzales’s The Miniature Wife, and new subscribers will start with that book. We’ll be chatting with Manuel about his book on January 2, so there’s still plenty of time to get the book, get in on the discussion, and talk with the author. (Plus, free book!)

And in January, we’ll be reading the latest George Saunders collection, Tenth of December. As with every Rumpus Book Club selection, you’ll get your copy before anyone else does.

On the poetry side, we’re reading Dana Goodyear’s The Oracle of Hollywood Boulevard right now, and we’ll be chatting with her on January 3. New subscribers also have time to get the book and get in on the chat. (Plus, free book!)

And in January, we’ll be reading Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair, out from Subpress. As with the Rumpus Book Club, you’ll get new collections of poetry before anyone else does, and have a chance to chat with the author about her work.

And you can also give these subscriptions as a gift. So send some literature your friends’ way, and get a bonus book while you’re at it.

Related Posts:

• A Rumpus Book Clubs Update
• The Rumpus Book Clubs Present: Summer Reading!
• What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update
• The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Camille Guthrie
• Why I Chose Camille Guthrie’s Articulated Lair for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

(She even calls our Book Club awesome. What a charmer.)

Related Posts:

• Jami Attenberg Roundup
• “What’s Eating Jami Attenberg?”
• Praise for The Middlesteins
• The Rumpus Book Clubs Present: Summer Reading!
• What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update

Here are some links to psych you up for this good read:

The Rumpus’s own Saturday Editor Michelle Dean sits down with Attenberg for her “Quit Your Job! (But For The Right Reasons)” interview series at The Awl.

Brad Listi (who we interviewed not too long ago) chats with Attenberg on his always-enjoyable Other People podcast.

And over at The Hairpin, Attenberg gives us the beautiful, funny, and self-deprecating (but also self-loving) essay, “My History of Being Fat”—a perfect pairing with The Middlesteins.

Related Posts:

• “What’s Eating Jami Attenberg?”
• Praise for The Middlesteins
• The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Jami Attenberg
• “devastatingly poignant with a dash of humor”
• The Daily Beast Loves The Rumpus Book Club

In “What’s Eating Jami Attenberg?”, the writer talks shop about her latest novel, The Middlesteins, and also puts in a good word for chivalry in art:

“…that’s totally tied into who I am as a writer. But I think of being of service actually quite a bit. As creative people, we should be really conscious of being of service in our work, being as generous as we can.”

What a lady!

Related Posts:

• Jami Attenberg Roundup
• Praise for The Middlesteins
• The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Jami Attenberg
• “devastatingly poignant with a dash of humor”
• The Daily Beast Loves The Rumpus Book Club

The event will also feature Rumpus editor Isaac Fitzgerald in discussion with Alcott.

Don’t miss it! Tuesday, October 16, 6:30 pm. Alley Cat Books (3036 24th St.)

Related Posts:

• The Daily Beast Loves The Rumpus Book Club
• A Rumpus Book Club Update
• The Rumpus Book Club Discussion 29 – Kathleen Alcott
• The Rumpus Book Clubs Present: Summer Reading!
• What Others Are Saying About What We’re Reading: A Book Clubs Update