Maddie Oatman

Tao Lin gets mentioned in a Guardian article about the challenges of naming characters. “I chose names that would not cause the reader to feel like there was hidden meaning in them, or that the characters were symbolic or the…

“How do you satirize something that’s already a parody of itself?” asks Michael Schaub of NPR in his write-up of Andrew Altschul‘s Deus Ex Machina. Schaub finds Altschul’s attempts to do so pretty successful, calling the novel brilliantly observed and…

We’ve compiled links to footage of several interviews with Jim Shepard, whose You Think That’s Bad is our February Book Club pick. Truthdig has posted an excerpt of Andrew Foster Altschul‘s new novel Deus Ex Machina. The scene shows a…

I remember/ the trick of thinking through infinity, a crowd of eyes/ against an asphalt wall, writes Timothy Donnelly in his poem “The Cloud Corporation.” If you haven’t had the chance to pore through his latest collection by the same…

You can read notes from our book club discussion of Pacazo, Roy Kesey‘s new novel that reminded one reader of The Sound and the Fury, “with an unreliable narrator whose narrative goes back and forth in time.” If you’re in…

Poetry gets so ignored. A moment to appreciate the bad-ass poets of the Rumpus Poetry Club and some of their accolades this past year: Timothy Donnelly‘s Cloud Corporation earned a spot among “The Year’s Best Poetry” according to NPR (also…

“San Francisco is the best place in the country to be a writer,” says author Andrew Altschul in a profile by Publisher’s Weekly about his new book Deux Ex Machina. Considering Altschul’s novel takes on the morally vapid world of…

NPR’s Bill Goldstein took on Adam Levin’s “thousand-page debut splash,” The Instructions, calling it “daunting enough as a matter of real estate alone.” Read Goldstein’s review to find out whether he thinks it prevails in the Tolstoy Challenge (are books…

The Guardian‘s Nicholas Lezard examines Tao Lin‘s Richard Yates. “It is all achingly hip,” Lezard writes, “in its studied avoidance of the depths that literary fiction is meant to plumb. And that might be the end of the matter –…

-You can still get a copy of The Rumpus Women Volume 1, edited by Julie Greicius and Elissa Bassist (whose interview with Amy Sedaris is outlandishly funny) if you sign up by November 15th. –Elizabeth Alexander‘s experience as a black…