The Rumpus Valentine’s Day Review of Drenched
[T]he universe of Marisa Matarazzo’s first book is soaked through, awash in torrential love and water.
Features & Reviews
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“Feeling Like I Was Getting Somewhere.”
“My own path into writing songs comes directly through literature. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a capital-A author, and I wrote short stories on an old…
Cars are Always Funny and So are Landlords and Sex
“The affect, here, stems from the naive individual’s skewed encounter with systems larger than himself, an encounter which, reprised again and again, plays out Bergson’s first rule of comedy: that…
San Francisco’s Demographic Shift
“San Francisco’s Marcus Books has long been a gathering place for African-American authors such as Maya Angelou. But last year, manager Blanche Richardson faced the realization that the 50-year-old bookstore…
You Mean Writing Can’t Be My Career?!
“What the profiles fail to reveal is that the literary apprenticeship is a lengthy one for the majority, that getting published at all is difficult, and to get paid enough…
Things Not To Do In Your Debut Novel
“To sit down to read a novel is a mere fraction of the commitment required to write one, but in both cases the commitment must be made, and it needs…
Kierkegaard Available in English
“In a just world, translators would be paid ten times as much as authors. Their work cannot be other than tedious, their names are soon forgotten, yet one has only…
Old Man Winter Comes to Town
In attempt to cheer myself up about my city’s neverending thundersnow, I present here Beatrice Braun-Fock’s whimsical illustrations for Old Man Winter Comes to Town by Hilde Hoffmann. The German…
The Cost of Digital Lit
First there was the bitter move by Amazon to remove all Macmillan titles from its digital inventory after Macmillan demanded higher e-book pricing. Then two more publishing houses publicly denounced…
The Rumpus International Rivers Interview #4: Dumitru Tsepeneag on the Danube
Dumitru Tsepeneag is a Romanian novelist, essayist and one of the founders of the Romanian Oniric literary movement. Established in the mid-60s, the Oniric group was inspired by surrealism and…
A Context of “Romantic Relationships.”
The Poetry foundation has published “an emotionally devastating analysis of five love poems” by Tao Lin in honor of Valentine’s Day.
The Plath Cabinet
Many of the strongest poems in this poetical homage politicize Sylvia [Plath], showing her to be less a victim than a citizen of her time, whom history can misrepresent but…