Become a Rumpus Member
Join NOW!Joining the ranks of John Ashbery, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Adrienne Rich, Field Guide author Robert Hass was honored with the highly lucrative Wallace Stevens Award by the Academy of American Poets last Tuesday. You can read one of his famous prose poems here.
...moreFans of Cloud Atlas, a sextet of sweeping stylistic range, know well that Granta-recognized author David Mitchell has a knack for mimesis. But they may not know that he is also “uncommonly good at imitating nonhuman noises.” In anticipation of his new “psychovoltaic” novel, The Bone Clocks, Catherine Schultz walks with him through the Irish […]
...moreCurtis Sittenfeld, author of Sisterland and guest judge of McSweeney’s first-ever student short story contest, told McSweeney’s in an interview that she is looking for fiction with a “pulse,” that engages “in a kind of conversation,” and that serves the writer’s obsessions. She also goes into her own history as a writer, including current projects: […]
...moreIn an interview with The New Yorker, Graywolf poet Claudia Rankine discusses Ferguson, James Baldwin, and the experience of invisibility: “[T]he sort of execution-style shooting takes [Michael Brown’s shooting] to this whole other place that starts approaching the language of lynching, and public lynching, and bodies in the street that people are walking around.” To […]
...moreFor those of us who haven’t glanced at e.e. cummings since high school, it’s easy to forget that literature is a visual medium. When we think about reading, our minds often go straight to content. But rockstar cover designer Peter Mendelsund’s masterful work of phenomenology, What We See When We Read (Random House), minces popular […]
...moreDo you know what year the word “zombie” first stalked the English lexicon? Do you think you can provide your kids with a “psychologically safe context for contemplating a collapsed world”? Did you read the CDC’s memo on zombie preparedness tips? Neither did we. Allow us to direct you to Clair McLafferty’s very highbrow meditation […]
...moreThe latest installment of The Toast’s delicious “Children’s Stories Made Horrific” series, we are gleeful to report, takes on Le Petit Prince. Featuring quotes like “I drew him my hunger and my thirst. It had long teeth, and a long throat” and “It is such a secret place, the land of tears,” Mallory Ortberg perverts […]
...moreRichard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Sherwood Anderson and William and Faulkner. Henry James and Edith Warton. And now, X… and you! The Association of Writers & Writing Programs just announced the establishment of a mentorship program starting in September. As stated on their community page, they are giving special consideration to applicants of backgrounds “typically […]
...moreIf asked who reviewed Haruki Murakami’s new novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Patti Smith might not be your first guess. But review it she did—skillfully, favorably, and, to no surprise, colorfully. Of the main character, she writes that his “unfathomable anguish seems to […]
...moreIn celebration of Guy de Maupassant’s 164th birthday, Paris Review blogger Dan Piepenbring revisits his, ahem, seminal story, “Boule de Suif,” about a French prostitute who, like Melville’s Bartleby, would “prefer not to.” Read his coverage here, and the original piece here.
...moreUnaccustomed, vicious, onomatopoeia… We all have that one word we can never spell correctly. Paris Review blogger Sadie Stein’s was “Wednesday.” “It’s like a mental block,” she writes, “or maybe, an increased reliance on technology.” Read the rest of the mini-essay here.
...moreDig historical fiction? In the forthcoming issue of The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn revisits Augustus, the last novel written by John Williams, author of the literary cult favorite, Stoner. “Like the best works of historical fiction about the classical world,” Mendelsohn writes, “Augustus suggests the past without presuming to create it.” Originally published […]
...moreIn an interview with Daniel Olivas for the Los Angeles Review of Books, debut novelist Natalia Sylvester talks about growing up in Peru, learning characters’ secrets, and what happens when you set aside a story for nearly six years. “Our pasts are never left behind,” she concludes ominously. Chasing the Sun has just been released […]
...moreDebuting what is surely one of the longer titles in literary history, Bethany Billman has published a piece called, “Lost Scenes from Generic Hipster Indie Romance Films Found in 2076 During a Museum Restoration of an Old MacBook Air and Subsequently Adapted for the Stage During Heritage Week at a Camp for 7th and 8th […]
...moreYesterday’s New York Times posed this question to poetry superstars Tracy K. Smith, Martin Espada, William Logan, Paul Muldoon, Sandra Beasley, Patrick Rosal, and our own David Biespiel. Whether by “educat[ing] the senses,” combatting irony, or “ritualiz[ing] human life,” suffice it to say, the answer is Yes.
...moreThe first printed book in the English language was just sold at auction for £1,082,500. Coming in at 540 years old, The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye revamps Greek mythology idols as chivalric heroes and is considered the crowning achievement of William Caxton, “the father of printing in England.”
...morePopular novelist Teddy Wayne’s latest entry in his series of proverbs for McSweeney’s is called “Thought.” No, not the deep kind. Read it here.
...moreNew York’s own Erika Anderson has a reading series unlike any other. Once a month, Brooklynites step up to the mic in a vintage clothing store and read poetry from their high school years. As Anderson explains, “If I don’t risk humiliation, I’m not risking enough.”
...more