Blogs
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Dogs of Brooklyn by Susie DeFord
When poets decide to collect what they consider to be some of their best work into a manuscript, there are seemingly thousands of choices to make. Should all the poems be similar in style? What about subject? Should the order…
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An Elegy for Oxford American
There has been a shakeup recently at literary magazine The Oxford American. Editor and founder Marc Smirnoff and managing editor Carol Ann Fitzgerald were fired on July 15. They have since compiled a website detailing events leading up to and after their…
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Troy, Unincorporated by Francesca Abbate
The good news about Troy, Unincorporated by Francesca Abbate, is that though it is a re-imagination of Chaucer’s “Troilus and Criseyde” from his Canterbury Tales, you don’t have to have been an English major or a Chaucer lover to appreciate…
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Swinging Modern Sounds #37: The Age of Fine Arrangements
Cuddle Magic, in my opinion, is the band most likely to succeed, these days, if by succeed you mean getting a leg up, surpassing the modest touring-all-the-time-not-making-very-much-money-hustling-constantly model of the thing.
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Lit-Link Round-up
I don’t do Tumblr. In fact, I’m having acute paranoia that maybe I’ve just spelled or capitalized something wrong IN “Tumblr,” here in the public forum of The Rumpus. But this week there were a couple of cool, provocative links…
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We Are Many. We Are Everywhere.
A great deal of the conversation about publishing and diversity is grounded in the idea that there simply aren’t many writers of color.
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SELF-MADE MAN #14: Untroubling the Body
I’ve read that book over and over because I think it tells us something brilliant about the slippery nature of monstrosity: that the body is not ever evil; it’s the mind that bends.
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Butcher’s Tree by Feng Sun Chen
Take the omniscience and time-weary voice of myths, add in the best parts of fables, namely the anthropomorphic language and the supernatural weirdness, ground it in some extremely compelling poetry, and you’re still nowhere near what’s happening in this book.
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Partyknife by Dan Magers
When James Wright said, “I have wasted my life,” Dan Magers must haven taken it to heart.
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Writing Rules From Colson Whitehead
Want a free writing lesson? Colson Whitehead has some helpful tips over at The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review. If you missed it, be sure to read Nancy Smith’s Rumpus interview with Whitehead right here.
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Lit-Link Round-Up
Man Booker longlist announced . . . The deliciously subversive Paula Boemer’s novel, NINE MONTHS, coming soon from Soho. Soho, I should add, is cranking lately. They took Alex Shakar’s LUMINARIUM when the big trades had passed, and it ended…
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A Tale of Three Coming Out Stories
We are still in that time in our history where public figures come out of invisible closets largely built by a public insatiable in its desire to know all the intimate details of the private lives of very public people.