The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup

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Your humble Rumpus Sunday Editor is smitten. Over the last couple weeks, the book blogs have been in form, publishing intelligent, hilarious, insightful, and riveting posts. In a word, they’ve been brilliant. Some, but most certainly not all, of my evidence is below.

Maud Newton takes on the way we see E-books.

The Hate Mail Dramatic Reading Project (Peter Lorre impression included). (via)

“There are places where the historical record has gaps. That’s what art is there for.” — Toni Morrison quoted by Jane Ciabattari over at Critical Mass.

Eileen Miles on Can Xue. “Can Xue’s doing this surrealism of the body. It’s a surrealism that comes like a hallucination out of suffering and deprivation and loss.”

Slaughterhouse90210: Snapshots of bad TV with literary captions. Brilliant. (via)

Sam Pink at <HTMLGIANT> on relatability.

And in the world of book news, how will Zappos, with its famously “upbeat, sometimes goofy corporate culture” that occasionally includes “shots of vodka at Claim Jumpers,” influence Amazon now that they are owned by the e-retail giant? In a sidenote, does anyone else think vodka shots at Claim Jumpers sound like a terrible, terrible punishment?

Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA. More from this author →