Lit-Link Line-up

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Jennifer Egan says that Goon Squad could have been better and talks about the danger of applause, in an excerpt from Why We Write, and anthology featuring some of the most acclaimed writers of our time, including Rumpus regular Rick Moody.

A good week over at my other home, The Nervous Breakdown.  Jessica Blau’s infamous Six Question Sex Interview column at The Nervous Breakdown gets zombie-nasty with Sean Beaudoin.  (I think I’m next in this line-up…)

Mag Gabbert debuts with the powerful “Our Waking Life.”

And another Rumpus fave, Joshua Mohr, submits to the self-interview…with chaps.  Josh will be talking with Anisse Gross soon for the Sunday Rumpus, so stay tuned.

On The Millions, Michael Bourne writes on the latest Oprah’s Book Club selection, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, and dissects why it’s time readers of literary fiction cut Oprah some slack. Fun to see this piece open up with my former literary agent, Ellen Levine, who really is just a ridiculously lovely person.

Amidst today’s evolving definitions of what constitutes sex, Salon asks “What’s a “first time,” anyway?”

25 Truths About Publishing?  It made quite a buzz on Twitter, but I couldn’t bring myself to read it.  You decide.

And did you hear that JK Rowling fell off Forbes’ billionaire list because she donated so much to charity?  How cool is that?

Stephen is cranking with these cool short films…here’s Mistress.

I’m taking a little time off…no curated essays/interviews/fiction/reviews today.  Apologies–I hate to let a Sunday go by without showcasing something-and-someone awesome here.  But it’s one of those things where Life has me against the wall.  My mom’s been in a temporary nursing home for a month now, unable to put any weight on her foot after an accident, and I’ve been the sole caretaker for my 91-year-old disabled father while she’s gone, plus I’m on deadline for my novel edits at Algonquin.  I’m just going to have to switch into a lower gear for the next few weeks.  Luckily, a call for submissions on Facebook (I know, what the hell was I thinking?) has me so bombarded with Sunday Rumpus submissions that once I’m back in the swing of things, there should be a lot of new faces to flash around.  Looking forward to it.

Gina Frangello is the author of four books of fiction and a forthcoming memoir, Blow Your House Down. Her novel A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014) is currently under development by Netflix as a series produced by Charlize Theron’s production company, Denver & Delilah. Her most recent novel, Every Kind of Wanting (Counterpoint 2016) was included on several “best of” lists for 2016, including Chicago Magazine’s and The Chicago Review of Books’. She has nearly 20 years of experience as an editor, having founded both the independent press Other Voices Books, and the fiction section of the popular online literary community The Nervous Breakdown. She has also served as the Sunday editor for The Rumpus, and as the faculty editor for both TriQuarterly Online and The Coachella Review. Her short fiction, essays, book reviews, and journalism have been published in such venues as Salon, the LA Times, Ploughshares, the Boston Globe, BuzzFeed, the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, Psychology Today, and in many other magazines and anthologies. After two decades of teaching at many universities, including UIC, Northwestern’s School of Continuing Studies, UCLA Extension, the University of California Riverside Palm Desert, Roosevelt University, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Columbia College Chicago, Gina is excited to be a student again at the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Program for Writers, where she has returned to complete the PhD she left unfinished twenty years ago. More from this author →