Tin House writer and core faculty over at Tod Goldberg’s fab UC Riverside low residency MFA program, Mary Otis, has a line from her story animated over at Electric Literature. These are pretty cool.
Are others out there old enough to remember Katie Roiphe’s annoying piece in Harper’s, “Making the Incest Scene,” back in 1995? I generally consider Roiphe a shock jock. But here she defends John Updike’s allegedly maligned literary honor, and makes some fine points.
Congrats to new Rumpus essays editor, Roxane Gay! Here’s Roxane on running a micropress.
Roxane is fun to follow on Twitter. Stuff pisses her off. Recently she was bugged by Caitlin Flanagan (another practitioner of If You Have A Vagina But Diss Women, You Increase Your Chances Of Being Published In Harper’s and The Atlantic). You may remember Flanagan’s oldie disparaging the modern wife for not putting out enough. Roxane said she didn’t have time to write an essay about more recent Flanagan pet-peeves, but if she did it would no doubt rock.
Since she doesn’t, here’s seriously snarky hilarity on all things Flanagan over at The Awl.
I don’t really understand Reddit culture. And this isn’t “literary” either. But something cool seems afoot. Reddit raised a wild amount of money for a vandalized orphanage in Kenya, and it sparked a whole new subreddit branch of philanthropic outreach. More than worth checking out.
Sometimes we have to toot or our horn, or rather Emily Rapp’s horn. Emily’s gorgeous essay on last week’s Sunday Rumpus was syndicated at Longreads, where it became a top 5 read this week, and also by Canada’s biggest daily. Nice freaking way to make an entrance, Em!
I’m excited about Josip Novakovitch’s new book of essays from Dzanc.
Josip is a blunt, subversive, funny writer, besides knowing how to kick the reader in the chest emotionally. We at Other Voices Books have always nursed a little crush on him. We’ll bring him over some Sunday and spread the love.
P.S. I’ve been getting pretty cool pitches for Sundays, people! Exciting things coming from Zoe Zolbrod, Brad Listi, Julia Goldberg, Rob Roberge, Patrick Somerville and others . . . do you have a pitch? I’m not that hard to find . . .