American Short Story Writers Are Taught To Do It Wrong
John Barry has a piece up at The Baltimore City Paper in which he argues that too many American short story writers are taught to try to mimic that famous…
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Seth Fischer
657 posts
Seth Fischer’s writing has twice been listed as notable in The Best American Essays and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize by several publications, including Guernica. He was the founding Sunday editor at The Rumpus and is the current nonfiction editor at The Nervous Breakdown. He is a Dornsife PhD Fellow at USC and been awarded fellowships and residencies by Ucross, Lambda Literary, Jentel, Ragdale, and elsewhere, and he teaches at the UCLA-Extension Writer’s Program and Antioch University, where he received his MFA.
Mark Athitakis Talks Book Blogging
“I think there’s a lot of thoughtful engagement with books on blogs—a lot of quick-hit riffing and expressions of enthusiasm, and I participate in some of that myself. That has…
The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
The book blogs are full of awesome this week. You should read them. How to write to an editor: “I have given your request for evidence 23 hours of thought,…
The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
This week, Rumpus Books reviewed three novels and a collection of poems. Come read!
Amanda Palmer is “Not Afraid To Take Your Money”
Amanda Palmer, who says that she’s been getting criticism for making money from her webcasts, has one hell of a manifesto up on her blog called, subtly enough, “Why I…
Jim Shepard on Writing Fiction That’s Got Some Truth to It
“The first worry writers have when they consider working with something like historical events has to do with the issue of authority: as in, where do I get off writing…
An Oral History of Bay Area Punk
I grew up in Denver and moved out to the Bay Area when I was eighteen, partially because I’d heard about this magical “Gilman” place that seemed to go against…
The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
This week, Rumpus books has published reviews of a novel and two short story collections.
The Surreal Makes You Smarter
Allison Flood at the Guardian has dug up an article from the journal Psychological Science showing that reading surrealism may actually make people smarter. In the study, some subjects were…
Planning Out the End
“The idea that economics will aid us in thinking through the problem of the destruction of the natural world… commits us to the assumption that our world ought to be…
If Charles Bukowski Wrote Peanuts
For some reason, I’m in Santa Rosa at the moment, and it seems that Charles Schulz, the creator of Peanuts, was from here. I’ve figured this out because everything is…