The Daily Rumpus
Get Overly Personal Emails
From Stephen Elliott
What is particularly crucial to understand is that books were not dragged kicking and screaming into each new area of capitalism. Books not only are part and parcel of consumer capitalism, they virtually began it.
In an essay for the Virginia Quarterly Review, former head of Soft Skull Press Richard Nash explores the business of literature with an almost alarming degree of thoroughness.
...moreHere’s something to look forward to: Anne Helen Petersen’s “Scandals of Classic Hollywood” column, which we blogged about previously, is becoming a book!
If you simply can’t wait for the publishing-industry process to put that book in your hands, you can sate your appetite with Petersen’s longform piece “The Rules of the Game,” which appears in the latest issue of Virginia Quarterly Review.
...more
A Rumpus Meditation on Editors, Ambition, and Angry Dependence (in 33 loosely jointed parts):
1. On July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Kevin Morrissey, took his life. His note stated that he “just couldn’t bear it anymore.”
...moreWith newspapers folding and cutting corners all around the country, it’s easy to give up entirely on the fourth estate. But now look who’s riding in on their white horse: those writers you newspaper types wouldn’t give jobs to before because they tried to make their articles all “literary.” Take that, 5 W’s.
...moreThe Rumpus’s own Michelle Orange has a contribution in the Virginia Quarterly Review‘s most recent issue.
The piece, entitled “Beirut Rising,” “entertains with its amusing depiction of the Lebanese passion for plastic surgery, but the essay also penetrates deep into to the sadness at the city’s core.”
In order to highlight the piece, VQR‘s Anna Sheaffer asked Michelle 6 questions to “get her thoughts on Beirut’s political future, travel writing, and reporting in territory where journalists are suspect.”
...more