Posts by author
Ian MacAllen
-
World Cup Slaves: A Rumpus Roundup
Earlier today, the United States Attorney General charged 14 FIFA officials with 47 counts of corruption, racketeering, wire fraud, and money laundering. FIFA is the international association that oversees football (soccer), including the World Cup. Pundits have already begun to…
-
Amazon Faces Off Against Penguin Random House
Last year’s battle between Amazon and Hachette over book prices and online sales seems only to have been a portent of an ongoing crisis between publishers and the online retailer. While HarperCollins was able to rather quickly negotiate a deal earlier…
-
The Summer of White Authors
The New York Times‘s summer reading list has hit peak whiteness. The Gawker Review of Books has been tracking the Times‘s summer reading list and while the last few years have seen the list hover around 90% white authors, the 2015 list…
-
Big, Ugly Truth
Conservative pundits have been attacking Emma Sulkowicz, the Columbia student who spent the last year carrying around her mattress in protest of how the university handled the discipline hearing after she was raped, labeling her a liar. Most of these…
-
Notable NYC: 5/23–5/29
Saturday 5/23: Shiv Kotecha, Diana Hamilton, Mark Francis Johnson, and Danny Snelson celebrate the release of Kotecha’s collection EXTRIGUE. B.H.Q.F.U, 7 p.m., free. Elana Dykewomon and Irena Klepfisz celebrate the release of What Can I Ask, new and selected poems…
-
Emma Sulkowicz: A Rumpus Roundup
Emma Sulkowicz graduated from Columbia University yesterday. She might have gone unnoticed had she not also been carrying around a mattress. In her sophomore year at Columbia, Sulkowicz was raped. Like many rape victims, Sulkowicz considered her attacker a friend,…
-
The Rise of the Mega-Novel
Serial novels are nothing new, especially in genre fiction designed to keep readers shelling out money for the next phase of a story. But the sudden, rapid success of fantasy genre series like George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and the…
-
Internet Fame Won’t Sell Your Books
Internet fame probably won’t sell your book, says Jami Attenberg, an author who garnered 50,000 pageviews one day after her bicycle was stolen. Writing for Buzzfeed, Attenberg explains how she set up a sting operation to get back her stolen…
-
Choosing When to Die
Few things are more frightening for an academic and a scholar than losing the ability to think. Their livelihoods, and sense of self, are dependent on the cognitive ability to generate new ideas and write about them. And so for Sandy…
-
Before Twain Was Twain
Newspaper journalist Samuel Clemens would eventually go on to become novelist Mark Twain. But, Samuel Clemens was something of a story writer too. At the Guardian, Nicky Woolf reports that a scholar at the University of California has discovered and authenticated…
-
Notable NYC: 5/16–5/22
Saturday 5/16: Joseph Bradshaw presents The New York School with Thom Donovan, Monica McClure, Iris Cushing, and others. Berl’s Poetry, 7 p.m., free. Philip Glass reads Words Without Music: A Memoir. 192 Books, 7 p.m., free. Kristen Gleason and Icy Spicy…
-
Saida Grundy: A Rumpus Roundup
Dr. Saida Grundy, a recently hired Assistant Professor of Sociology and African-American Studies at Boston University, turned to Twitter to gripe about white privilege, writing, “White masculinity isn’t a problem for America’s colleges, white masculinity is THE problem for America’s…