April 2014
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You Are Invisible
Writing in the New Yorker about the smartphone app Cloak, Mark O’Connell offers a thoroughly beautiful and poetic commentary on the ontology of visibility: By generating a kind of omnipresence—whereby we are always available, visible, contactable, all of us there all the time—the technologies that…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Poet’s Journey Chapter 2
Every time you write a poem, you’re learning to become a poet once again. Your writing imitates not the banal sequence from life to death, but instead imitates a descent into and out of a new womb of clarity.
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Still Writing Like a Motherfucker
An article published in Flavorwire hails Cheryl Strayed (Rumpus’ very own Sugar) as a publishing hero. In Jason Diamond’s words, “Strayed is the rare type of writer who is both critically and commercially embraced, but also keeps her feet firmly planted in the literary world.” But how did this…
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How the Paperback Saved Civilization
With America gripped by the Great Depression, booksellers found that $2.75 put hardcover books out of reach for most readers. (A movie ticket then cost just 20 cents.) In 1939, with a full-page ad in the New York Times and…
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National Poetry Month Day 22: “The Great Loves of Our Lives” by Julie Enszer
The Great Loves of Our Lives Begin with the body desire manifests itself in the body: the flutter of the heart the nervous shake of a hand the dilation of the pupils hardening of nipples thickening of mucus within the…
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For Such Magnificence
There have been, and will continue to be, a lot of eulogies for Gabriel García Márquez this week. In the Sunday Times, Salman Rushdie has an especially nice meditation on magical realism: But if magic realism were just magic, it wouldn’t matter. It would…
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The Weight of Blood by Laura McHugh
Siân Griffiths reviews THE WEIGHT OF BLOOD by Laura McHugh today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
Seems like a good time to talk about monkey math. Here comes powdered alcohol. 1970s feminist trading cards. Maybe we just aren’t good enough for Celebration, Florida. The professional grotesques of Nicholas de Larmessin II.
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What the Websites Tell Me to Do
At best, I see her not as my oldest friend, but as the protagonist in a movie, lost and beautiful and unstable, a character I sympathize with even as she self destructs.
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Gary Shteyngart Won’t Blurb Your Book
A Gary Shteyngart blurb seemed almost a rite of passage in recent years, with the author of Super Sad True Love Story offering his recommendation to more than one hundred books. But Kirsten Reach reports that the author has retired…
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From True Love to Ambivalence
Think your love of certain passages will never fade? The New York Times Sunday Book Review argues that perhaps not all passages will withstand the test of time. How much does age change what we love? If you’re the sort of…
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One Chance to Make a First Impression
An editor’s first look at a writer’s work is in the query letter. Steph Auteri, writing in Ploughshares, explains how writers can improve their introductions, and why it matters when they try to publish. The best way to make an…