August 2012
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Sunday Rumpus Essay: Shadows and Ghosts: Batman, Thomas Cromwell, and the Corporation of Yaddo
Emily Rapp returns to the movies, with a meditation on Batman, grief, the shadows of Yaddo, and the inspirational power of weakness.
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My Mother Always Told Me Nice Is As Nice Does
At Slate, yesterday, Jacob Silverman wrote a piece denouncing the pernicious trend of “enthusiasm” he detects in the online literary universe. (BREAKING: People might still like and read books.) He holds up the writer Emma Straub’s Twitter feed as exhibit…
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Surreal Stories for Kids
“Tiny walruses in nutshells, talking slugs — what’s not to like?” At Wired, Jonathan H. Liu reviews three new McMullens picture books, all of which sport elaborately designed dust jackets that open up as posters.
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“Things I wouldn’t otherwise say”
“Letters are a slow-motion conversation, one where every word matters and you carefully consider what you want to say. One where discussions evolve over the course of months rather than hours and days.” Over at xoJane, an ode to writing…
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Seeking Grace in Strange Places
I am not a religious person. I usually tell people, if they ask, that I’m a secular humanist, because religion plays no part in my life. And mostly, this is true. In my non-writing life, that is.
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The Rumpus Interview with Mary Chapin Carpenter
Atypically outspoken for a politically liberal contemporary country singer, Carpenter has succeeded critically and commercially while honoring her own artistic inclinations.
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We Are Many. We Are Everywhere.
A great deal of the conversation about publishing and diversity is grounded in the idea that there simply aren’t many writers of color.
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Sweet Spot Sugar
After attending our release party for Tiny Beautiful Things, Ginger Murray of SF Weekly‘s The Sweet Spot channels Dear Sugar in her response to a young man seeking advice on desperation and romance. “…In honor of Cheryl Strayed, her fans…
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SELF-MADE MAN #14: Untroubling the Body
I’ve read that book over and over because I think it tells us something brilliant about the slippery nature of monstrosity: that the body is not ever evil; it’s the mind that bends.
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Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
Take the omniscience and time-weary voice of myths, add in the best parts of fables, namely the anthropomorphic language and the supernatural weirdness, ground it in some extremely compelling poetry, and you’re still nowhere near what’s happening in this book.
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Praise For Dispatch From The Future
This month’s Rumpus Book Club selection – Leigh Stein’s Dispatch from the Future – gets an outstanding review from Guernica Magazine: “Stein’s poems are the very perfect product of a frenetic in-between culture where knowledge is currency but also poverty, and its…
