June 2012
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Lou Reed, the poet
Lou Reed, member of The Velvet Underground, wrote a poem, “O Delmore how I miss you,” to his college professor Delmore Schwartz in Poetry Magazine. “Reading Yeats and the bell had rung but the poem was not over you hadn’t…
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Women Better at Sex Writing?
Martin Amis, whose new novel made it onto the PW Best Summer Books list, explained to his audience at the Hay Festival that “women write better about sex.” “As a novelist you are in a God-like relation to what you…
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Brian Spears in Cobalt
Cobalt Issue #4: Summer 2012 features an interview with our own Brian Spears. Topics of conversation include his debut collection, A Witness in Exile, shifting roles in the writing world, The Rumpus Poetry Book Club, and poetry’s place in education. …
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Love is not all” by Edna St. Vincent Millay
The last poem I loved also happens to be the first poem I loved enough to set to memory. Here’s why: it made me burst into tears in front of my classmates. Abject humiliation = required memorization. Simple. Me: College…
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Murakami Bingo
“Mysterious Woman. Ear Fetish. Dried Up Well. Speaking To Cats. Weird Sex…” Grant Snider brings an illustrated “Haruki Murakami Bingo” board to The New York Times‘ Sunday Book Review.
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FUNNY WOMEN #80: My Future Author Bios, from Least to Most Likely
This is Rupinder Gill’s 85th self-published book. She recently moved back in with her parents.
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Tumbeliever Party
The Believer and Tumblr are teaming up to present A Reading, Party, & Official Meetup in San Francisco. The event will star Mills Baker, our own Isaac Fitzgerald, Melissa Graeber, Joshua Heineman, and Sheila Heti! Saturday, June 23rd, 6pm at…
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The Rumpus Interview with Leni Zumas
I am fascinated by tiny, incremental changes, almost imperceptible shifts in how people orient themselves in the world, because those are in some ways the most hopeful.
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Gayle Brandeis at Salon
Over at Salon, Gayle Brandeis has a follow-up essay to her personal story, “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying,” about her mother’s suicide, published on the Rumpus last month. “I’ve made passing mention of my mom’s suicide in my writing over…
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Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain
Ben Fountain’s new novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, has been called “the Catch-22 of the Iraq war.” Read the Rumpus review here.
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“Bradbury Was My Man”
Junot Díaz, author of the last book Jordan Alam loved, mourns Ray Bradbury, writing of how the “prescient lyrical writer with an abiding hatred for intolerance” inspired “many of our most famous dreamers” and gave Díaz his “first real taste…
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Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Anyone who aspires to write will find the story of Ben Fountain—and the story of how his first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, came to be —both inspiring and heart-rending. Fountain began writing fiction at the age of thirty. He did not begin by dabbling, dangling pretty sentences…