Looking for some awesome new books to read this summer? The Rumpus Book Clubs have some great new fiction, non-fiction and poetry selections lined up for members over the next three months. No matter the weather, beachy warmth to, well, whatever you call the middle of the year in San Francisco, and everything in between, here’s what you’ll have a chance to read if you’re a member of the Rumpus Book Club or the Rumpus Poetry Book Club. (You can join both too!)
June
The Rumpus Book Club kicks off the summer with Alissa Nutting’s Tampa, “a sexually explicit, virtuosically satirical, American Psycho–esque rendering of a monstrously misplaced but undeterrable desire. Laced with black humor and crackling sexualized prose, Alissa Nutting’s Tampa is a grand, seriocomic examination of the want behind student / teacher affairs and a scorching literary debut.”
The Poetry Book Club, meanwhile, has already received their copies of Brian Russell’s The Year of What Now. Glenn Shaheen interviewed Russell earlier this year about this manuscript.
July
For July, we’re very pleased to announce the Rumpus Book Club will feature David Gilbert’s And Sons, described as a “panoramic, deeply affecting story of an iconic novelist, two interconnected families, and the heartbreaking truths that fiction can hide.”
Our Poetry Book Club will read Anna Journey’s second collection, Vulgar Remedies. Check out this interview in the Kenyon Review between Journey and graduate students in the University of Arkansas’s MFA program.
August
We’ll close out the summer in the Book Club with Poe Ballantine’s Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere. Check out this piece on Ballantine’s experiences writing this book and being featured in a documentary on the subject.
And Poetry Book Club members will end the summer with a bang as well, with Brenda Hillman’s newest collection, Seasonal Works With Letters of Fire. It’s her ninth collection of poetry.
But not only will you get to read these fabulous books ahead of everyone else–all these books will be in your hands weeks before they’re in bookstores or online–if you join up now, you’ll get to talk about them online with a large group of committed, intelligent readers, and you’ll also get to chat personally with the authors online at the end of the month. What’s cooler than that?
I’d say something about operators standing by to take your calls, but really, who uses a phone as a phone anymore. I mean, you can use your phone to sign up for the book clubs, but you can also use your desktop/laptop/tablet for that as well. We’re not picky.
