The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup

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Greetings, Rumpusers. You might have been relieved to see me go for a bit, but you had to know you couldn’t get rid of me forever. I’m back from a life-alteringly excellent trip to Los Angeles, where I finished school, and a less awesome though somewhat relaxing trip to Orange County, the result of which won’t be discussed here (good things rarely happen in Orange County, for the record).

All in all, I missed you, Rumpus. And once again, I’ve slogged through the blogs so you don’t have to. Here’s what I found.

At The Guardian Books Blog, Chris Power says that “2009 was the year of the short story.”

In response to an Amazon press release stating that more e-books were sold than hardcovers, Carolyn Kellogg notes (through Galleycat) that 64 of the top 100 “best-selling” Kindle books are free.

People are mad at Narrative Magazine. (via)

Guenter Grass was spied on by the Stasi (via), while Betsy Blair had her problems with the FBI (via) .

Maud points us to Louisa May Alcott’s “hospital sketches” from the Civil War, as well as this story at NPR on a movie about Alcott’s kind of extreme life.

Book sales in 2009 were  a disas…  wait, what’d you say? (via)

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 →