2014
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Song of the Day: What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?
The warm swing-era horn section and tasteful piano vamps are just a few reasons to listen to jazz icon Ella Fitzgerald, but today there’s a more obvious reason to cue up her silky ballad, “What Are You Doing New Year’s…
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Readers Report: Remorse
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Remorse.”
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Paper Birds
Clearing those pages plain, I’d make time fall away and distance shorten impossibly, fold upon fold, until the page was no longer a record of our histories but an origami swan.
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Serial: A Rumpus Roundup
This American Life spinoff Serial is a nonfiction podcast told over multiple episodes. Premiering back in October, Serial explores the case of Adnan Syed, who has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. Much…
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Happy New Year, in Multiple Dimensions
To celebrate the New Year, Electric Literature is giving away an interactive short story app from acclaimed Israeli author Alex Epstein! True Legends is a multi-dimensional app exploring the story of a blind piano tuner. Alongside Epstein’s story, the app features…
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Expanding The Book Universe
For the New Yorker, Louis Menand explores how the 1939 launch of Pocket Books “transformed the culture of reading.” The mass-market paperback line was one of the first to be sold at newsstands, a method of distribution that made pulp novels…
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Writing the Holidays
Sometimes we forget that many of the books and plays we know so very well are set during holiday festivities. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Annie Cardi reminds us of “holidays and traditions in literature.”
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A Manifesto for Bad Poetry
If guided well, no-one who sets out to write a bad poem is going to accidentally write an excellent one.
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Weekly Geekery
Building an academic audience. The technology of your childhood. Academic innovation and the blame game. Pain and your brain and gain. When Reddit and journalism collide.
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The Joy of Writing
What happens when writing ceases to be enjoyable? Over at Beyond the Margins, Dell Smith discusses how the joy of writing must eventually yield to the joy of a finished draft because while writing first drafts might be pleasurable, the…
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Lewis’s Spiritual Rebellion
For the Guardian, Hilary Mantel wonders where to “shelve” C.S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed. While the work’s Christian themes make it tempting to label it as a “religious” text, Mantel argues that the book is complicated by Lewis’s “crisis of faith” after the death of…
