There’s never been a better time to join The Rumpus Book Club, either by the month or by the year. If you join now, we’ll throw in a bonus: your choice of the Rumpus Tote Bag or the Rumpus Quotes Mug! This offer is for a limited time only, and is available only to new subscribers and subscribers who have allowed their subscriptions to lapse. Just tell us which bonus you’d prefer in the Customer Notes section of the checkout page and we’ll ship it to you with your first book. So what’s the Rumpus Book Club up to?
For more than 5 years now, the Rumpus Book Club has been one of the more unique book clubs around. Where else do you get to talk about books before they’ve been published, and chat online with the author besides? We’ve talked with Cheryl Strayed about Wild and George Saunders about Tenth of December, and earlier this year, with Roxane Gay about An Untamed State. So what’s coming up next for the Rumpus Book Club?
This month—and yes, there’s still time to join and receive this book—we’re reading Benchere in Wonderland by Steven Gillis, about which Dawn Raffel, author of The Secret Life of Objects, writes:
Steven Gillis has created an indelible character in Benchere and let him loose in a slyly subversive wonderland of art, violence, love, grief, greed, and grand ideals. At once magnificently strange and achingly intimate, Gillis’ novel lingers and burns long after the covers are shut.
We’ll be chatting with Steven Gillis on August 30th, so sign up now so you can have your book in time to join in the conversation.
In September, we’re doing something new with the book club—we’re celebrating the re-release of a classic novel, Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls. Back in 2011, we interviewed Myles and she had this to say about this book:
Rumpus: Chelsea Girls is out of print and I had to pay $30 to get it used. What’s the story with that?
Myles: The guy who ran Black Sparrow was a millionaire, mostly thanks to Charles Bukowski. But I think that what publishing was becoming—when Borders would refer to publishers as “partners”— John Martin, the guy who started it in the 60s, was a great publisher, wonderful to deal with, but he just didn’t want to become that. So he just pulled the plug on it and sold Bukowksi and Paul Bowles and John Fante, who were the big sellers to Ecco, who did their own Black Sparrow imprint.
They tried to sell me, Ed Sanders and Andrei Codrescu, but they didn’t buy us, we were the next tier.
It’s a little hard, because I don’t want to be stuck, I don’t want to give the copyright to someone that I’m uncomfortable with. So a number of people have asked to publish it, and what I keep waiting for is a publisher that I’m excited about. That was the plan with this book, but I’m always too weird. With fiction I’ve always had agents who are always like, “Of course you’ll be able to sell this book!” And then people are so weird about my work. With Chelsea Girls it was like, “These stories just kinda crumble, they don’t, you know… arc.” Or, “They kind of deteriorate.” And I was like, Yes! Yes.
I’ve had a few editors in the mainstream who have been interested. They’ll say to me—and this is even in the ’90s when I had published a lot of books—they’d say,”We’ll have to work very closely with you because it’s a first book.” It’s like, you’re kidding. So what I felt time and again is what I’m being told is they’re going to help me fix my work. Fix that bad English. Make those stories pop up at the end.
It’s not worth it to me to work so long on a book and then just let somebody destroy it. So I keep being with good independent publishers and each time I write a book I’ll think, well certainly an editor could get this book as-is. And it comes close sometimes, but generally it’s just their advertising and marketing people who think lesbian and not new, because I’ve had a reputation, I think I’m on this shelf already.
Rumpus: So there’s wariness on both sides.
Myles: Yeah. But my thought continues to be that when there’s a publisher—and you know it could be an independent press—that I feel that I will just always stick with these guys, I’ll publish Chelsea Girls. So it’s tricky, but I’m just being protective.
I can’t tell you how excited we are to talk to Eileen Myles about this groundbreaking book.
And then in October, we’re going to be reading and talking to one of the funniest men on the Internet, Lincoln Michel, about his new collection of stories, Upright Beasts. Here’s what Heavy Feather Review had to say about it:
Put on your seat belt, it’s a ride towards Lovecraftian country houses and Long Island-like suburbia, to places we know and love and places we dare not think of. . . some of these stories will ignite your imagination, while others will force you to retreat from the real world temporarily. . . For all of the elements in this collection that make this fiction, there is an absolutely stunning image of what it’s like to be human, to live life and allow it to slip away, as Michel says: “Death, in all its myriad incarnations, was, as always, right around the corner.” . . . it’s not just about how frighteningly close a writer can bring us to our imagination, it’s how close he can bring us to our reality.
And we’ll keep bringing you great books and terrific conversations. Why don’t you join us?
