The brainchild of essays editor Roxane Gay, Rumpus, Readings will accompany select original essays and allow readers to listen to an audio track of the author reciting their piece.

Here is Jones’ inaugural reading:

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From this role, where I have a bit of distance, it’s been hard not to notice that the success of the Rumpus has led to a bit of a Rumpus identity freak-out. So I asked Stephen Elliott if I could say a few words about it, and he said it’d be okay, so I’d like to do that and then open this up for your comments. I’d also like to ask that, in the comments, we not single out any specific people or articles or blog posts. Any comments like that won’t be approved.

Here’s a story: A few months after I started here, Stephen asked me to write up a book blog panel I happened to be at in LA. The panelists there had some good advice, but they also spoke again and again about the importance of “dust-ups.” To make it as a book blogger, a few of them said, it didn’t hurt to get your hands dirty. There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned Internet fight to drive traffic.

This isn’t what The Rumpus was about, and I knew it. So I attacked. I wrote a blistering blog post about how many of the people involved in this “dust up” panel were ugly (in fact, they were mind-numbingly attractive) and dumb (I was wrong there too) and must eat children in their spare time (there is no evidence I was wrong about that one.) It was supposed to be an over-the-top meta-commentary mocking them for calling for meaningless fights just to boost traffic.

But when I showed it to Steve, he said, “Can’t do it, Seth.”

This was the one and only time anyone had asked me not to print anything I’ve written here.  It was also the only time I’d cleared anything with him beforehand.

He had a problem with it (and I guess I did too) because whether its editors consciously know it or not, the Rumpus isn’t really about “culture” as opposed to “pop culture.” It’s not, as some of our critics put it, about being nice all the time. And it’s not only about Stephen Elliott or Isaac Fitzgerald or that wonderful Sugar or Rick Moody or Elissa Bassist. These people are all important, but they’re aspects of something else: this site is about inspiring and creating a community for a huge group of writers in one of the bleakest times in the history of literature. And it’s about turning that bleakness into something beautiful.

What I’d done in my blog post was try to put down some writers for self-aggrandizement and to get The Rumpus some hits. It wasn’t cool because it would have hurt the writing community, because there were a hundred positive things I could’ve talked about and I chose something that would start a war, just because I could.

And that was really fucked up, considering what the site had done for me.

I joined The Rumpus after sending Steve an email asking him if I could help answer emails or lick envelopes.  He met me at a coffee shop, loaned me his computer charger, and asked me to write up a couple blog posts. I did. At the time, I was at a partial residency program; I was happy with the program, but, like most MFA’s, it wasn’t going to get me anywhere on its own. I had one publication. A couple weeks later, Steve and Isaac asked me, with my incredibly tiny amount of experience, if I would be on the masthead as the Sunday editor.

At what other magazine or website would that be possible?  So much of the literary world is so fixated on status that it seems impossible to break in. Most people, many of them extremely talented, give up on writing for that reason. Most sites or magazines would ask me what kind of readers I would bring in (very few), or where I went to school (a great school that doesn’t get enough credit), or who my agent was (ha!). The Rumpus saw me as a potential writer, as a potential blogger, as someone who would probably work hard for them. They saw me as someone who believed in and could be a part of a community. And I love them for that.

And because they had no money, they also saw me as someone who would work for free. I was happy to do this. I’m still happy to do this. For one, there’s lots of people at the site who deserve to get paid a lot more than me. Also, it gives me the freedom not to feel bad about messing up.

But it also leads to the question of the day, the thing Rumpus writers keep bringing up in whispers at parties and my parents keep asking me about and the editors are grumbling over. I’m in awe of how quickly and spontaneously the Rumpus has grown. The average number of daily hits has increased something like 800 percent since I started. The Book Club is doing wonderfully, with hundreds of subscribers. According to the last daily Rumpus, some people are actually donating money. As someone who runs another literary website, I can’t tell you how amazing that is, especially since The Rumpus isn’t a nonprofit.

This is still a literary site, so no one is rolling in hundred dollar bills. But something has changed, and I’m not sure what it means.  Will money and audience corrupt us? In a community of hundreds of people, how do you make sure no one feels left out? Who do you pay and who don’t you? Do you continue to pay no one and invest all the money in expanding the website? Do you pay everyone $2.75? Do you allow advertising, like this, to try to bring in more funds so you can pay more people? Do you give Isaac a raise? Really, how do you keep the people who joined The Rumpus to join a community from feeling shitty? How do we make sure we’re still letting in people like me a few years ago, people who need this place more than anything? How does The Rumpus remain The Rumpus?

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I was reading about the BEA and the launch of Bay Citizen and I thought I should say something about publishing and then thought I didn’t have much to say. But then I thought that books, like so much else, are moving toward community. What we look for in a good independent bookstore are recommendations. We know we can’t trust the larger publishers. When Richard Nash left Soft Skull his advice for the new owners was to keep accepting un-agented submissions “because those are your readers.” I’ve thought about that a lot. In their article on the Book Expo the New York Times focuses on Keith Richards and Barbara Streisand and various ghost written memoirs. In Garrison Keillor’s op-ed he reminisces about the joy of learning he’d just gotten a large advance for a book. It was easy, equate art with money, money with success. And this is why The Rumpus Book Club is doing so well, much better than I expected. Many of us long for community, we want to read the same book together and talk about it but we don’t want to read the books the large presses are pushing on us. We don’t want read books with a platform, or a tie-in. As the media fragments into ebooks and blogs and print on demand and iPads the desire for community is consistent.

Which ties into my thinking about this email newsletter that I’m writing right now and how it’s really no different. Writing, trying to communicate, hoping to connect. I’ve written enough at this point to know what it’s fair to expect from a reader as well as the obligation, the debt the author incurs. The reader is always doing you a favor.

As I said, it’s raining, the clouds wrap the new skyscraper south of Market like a chemical gauze, a mood stabilizer with some wind.

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I did a search for “Rumpus” and came up with this picture from 1947. Also, there were instructions on how to use the already existing plumbing from a “powder room” to make a bar, without losing the powder room. All of that seemed about right.

And then I decided to search for the phrase “uh-oh,” because that could only end well, and I learned what kind of man uses Vaseline Hair Tonic.

What can you find?

(via Boing Boing)

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In the group homes, holidays weren’t so bad because we teenagers were all in the same parentless boat. Depending on the home, we would be given presents and there would be a nice meal. Volunteers would take us ice skating or bowling or something like that.

It was when I became a nominal adult, a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, that I began to understand my predicament.

Winter break would come; the students scattered; the dorms closed. And I had to figure out where to go.

Go check out the whole thing.

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The future of book reviewing is online.

I say this not as a cheerleader for all things hi-tech (hell, I don’t even own an iPod), nor as some prophet of the post-physical book, but because the model of book reviewing we’re used to – delivered by the priestly class of critics; limited by paper, ink, column inches; determined by the latest microtrend and by who an author’s agent had lunch with – is clearly history.

Even before the meltdown in the publishing industry, book reviewing was in trouble, with major newspapers downsizing or eliminating their reviews, even as the number of books published every year continued to climb. Just this month, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution changed its “Arts & Books” section to “Arts & Leisure,” Maud Newton reports that book reviews are in trouble at alternative weeklies, and the Washington Post’s Book World lost its editor and may fold. [Jan. 28 update: Book World is folding.] Fewer and fewer books are getting reviewed, even in venerated outlets like the New York Times Book Review or Book World, while review editors focus on books with the greatest sales potential and authors with “platform,” i.e. high visibility for reasons other than literary talent. Publishers, needing to make good on bloated investments in veteran authors and Next Big Things, devote little effort to getting reviews for lower-profile authors. As a result, reviewers have increasingly converged on the same handful of titles, and book reviews have become homogenous and predictable, an echo chamber in which mediocre but heavily promoted books stand a better chance than obscure works of great originality.

Needless to say, this model doesn’t serve authors, readers, or literary culture very well. And now it seems to be in its last throes.

The past few years have seen some positives, like the success of social networking sites like Library Thing and Goodreads, as well as book coverage in newer publications like The Believer. People still read, and they still want to talk about books – how will the dwindling supply of coverage keep up with this demand?

Enter Rumpus Books.

At The Rumpus, we believe that a healthy literary culture is one which embraces writing of all kinds, by authors of all stripes – young and old, established and emerging, traditional and experimental, writing from the margins or from (or about) the heart of mainstream culture, published by “major” houses or by smaller presses. We don’t believe a book is “dead” two weeks after publication, and we’ll often review books out for a year or longer. We believe an author’s reputation, or previous sales, are irrelevant to a fair assessment of his or her work, and should play no role in the decision to review it. On the subject of decisions, we believe in making as few of them as possible: In the new world of reviews, the more the better, to reflect the immense range of writing and reading in America.

We believe the best people to write about books are people who love books. Most of our reviews, therefore, will be by working writers, and largely determined by what they, themselves, decide to read, rather than vice versa. In this way, we hope to incite a big, messy, unpredictable conversation about what’s new, exciting, and consequential in contemporary literature.

At Rumpus Books you’ll find reviews, sure, and lots of ‘em. You’ll also find interviews with writers, some you’ve heard of and some you haven’t – and not just when they have a new book to publicize. You’ll find our blog – The Blurb – in which we discuss the state of our writing culture, our literary community, and the writer’s life. In the coming months, we’ll add other features, like a “bookroll” for easy access to our archives, and reviews of Lost Classics. We’ll have the Unreview (stay tuned!), and video clips of readings. We’d love to hear your suggestions and comments – just drop us a line at books@therumpus.net.

To authors, we say: Send us your book or your galleys. We make no promises about how, or if, it will be reviewed, except that it will have nothing to do with who you are or whether anyone else has reviewed it.

To editors, publicists, and agents: We’re eager to hear about your new books, and we hope to review many of them. But we don’t care how big an advance you gave an author, or who blurbed them, or whether Oprah has expressed interest. Send us your catalogues, or drop us a line.

And to readers and lovers of literature: This is for you, and for all of us who want to save book culture from the doldrums of downsizing. We still read, all of us, and despite what we’ve been hearing the reservoir of new writing is deeper and more diverse than it’s ever been. We hope to bring a great deal of it to your attention.

Rumpus Books is open for business.

Andrew Altschul
Books Editor

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