The “Wow” Factor

For The Millions, editor Gerald Howard reflects on his search for manuscripts that “wow.” In addition, Howard explains how books like Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain helped to cultivate his interest in publishing, and explores how the subject matter of literature has changed over time:

We’ve traveled a long, long way from the storied four-decade publishing association of Alfred Knopf with Thomas Mann, nostalgia for which is a fairly useless emotion in our Godzilla vs. King Kong world of death-match throwdowns against Amazon and Apple and Google and the Justice Department.

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Jake Slovis is a writer and educator. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he teaches courses focused on visual narrative and composition. His work has appeared in The Millions, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers our readers may already know and love. We want to bring new perspectives into the conversation that will make us all look deeper.

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