There’s still time to get the December selections if you join either (or both!) the Rumpus Book and Poetry Book Clubs. What makes our book clubs special? Well, our first readers have a terrific track record of selecting truly amazing books, and members get books before anyone else does because we only select books that haven’t been released yet. So this year, for example, members got their hands on books by George Saunders, Roxane Gay, and Leslie Jamison weeks before the book purchasing public did. We were reading poems by Jericho Brown and Erika Meitner, Simone Muench and Fanny Howe, while people who ordered from Amazon were waiting for an email saying their book had shipped.
My favorite part of the book clubs, though, is the online chats we get to do with the authors of the books. We talked about the prison-industrial complex with Emily Abendroth, football with Steve Almond, Lennon-McCartney with Joshua Shenk, and alter egos with Keetje Kuipers.
So who’s up next in the queue? In poetry, it’s Tom Sleigh, whose new book from Graywolf Press is Station Zed. Graywolf says of this book, “In this latest collection, Sleigh carries into these poems his experiences as a journalist on tours of Lebanon, Somalia, Iraq, and Libya. But these are also dispatches from places of grief, history, and poetic traditions as varied as Scottish ballads and the journeys of Basho.” Join the poetry book club here.
For fiction, we’re excited to announce that we’ll be reading Rachel Cusk’s Outline, a Novel, from Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, who describes it this way: “Rachel Cusk’s Outline is a novel in ten conversations. Spare and stark, it follows a novelist teaching a course in creative writing during one oppressively hot summer in Athens. She leads her students in storytelling exercises. She meets other visiting writers for dinner and discourse. She goes swimming in the Ionian Sea with her neighbor from the plane. The people she encounters speak volubly about themselves: their fantasies, anxieties, pet theories, regrets, and longings. And through these disclosures, a portrait of the narrator is drawn by contrast, a portrait of a woman learning to face a great loss.” Join the prose book club here.
You can also join the book clubs on a yearly, or for a limited time, a 6-month basis, and as noted above, you can join both clubs at once and get a little bit of a discount. See all your Rumpus book club options here.
