Features & Reviews
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Not the Greatest Villains Then Living in the World
The other week, The New Yorker published an excellent article by Caleb Crain about the peculiar economics and politics of life aboard a pirate ship in the 17th and 18th centuries. When the captain of an English slave ship was…
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“Publishing is often an extremely negative culture.”
Author and ex-soldier for the publishing world, former Executive Editor-in-Chief of Random House and fiction editor of The New Yorker Daniel Menaker attempts to break down the industry’s struggle into variables of audience, cost, risk, and heart in his recent…
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Now You See It…
The Art of Disappearing has been compared to The Time Traveler’s Wife, but Ivy Pochoda’s prose is lusher, her characters more melancholy, her style more mysterious.
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The Rumpus Interview with Donald Ray Pollock
I tried to put a lot of humor in Knockemstiff because the things that happen in my stories—if there wasn’t any humor, by the time you finished reading the book you’d probably want to kill yourself.”
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Grant Munroe: The Last Book I Loved, The Queue
The Queue by Vladimir Sorokin is a great piece of Soviet satire, a sub-genre of which there’s plenty to love. Like the host of Russian satirists that preceded him–Gogol, Zoshchenko, Bulgakov–Sorokin jumps in impish dance around a host of unspeakable…
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Free Books Mean the World to Me
Lit Drift has another Free Book Friday contest coming up. This week they’re giving away a copy of Rumpus contributor Joshua Mohr‘s Some Things That Meant the World to Me. In the Rumpus review of Morhr’s book Joshua Furst writes:…
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“My Worst Mistake? Getting Sick of My Work”
Fiction writer Michelle Wittle got so tired of going over her short story that she just sent the damn thing out, assuming it had no typos. Oops. Of course, this is why you have friends read your stuff just to…
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview with Shya Scanlon
We’re catching up with Shya Scanlon halfway through the serialization of his novel, Forecast, across 42 web journals and blogs. The Rumpus: How is the serialization going? How are people responding to it? Are they following the novel across its…
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Re-Commencement: Notes on an English Professor’s Retirement
My father knew he had a jealous daughter, and I knew he was impervious: the books—and the inner life he cultivated with tremendous discipline—would always win.
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Notable New York, This Week 9/21-9/27
As the New York Bureau Chief, I thought it might be a good idea to round up some notable literary and cultural events going on around New York that I think readers of The Rumpus would be interested in. So,…
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Van Booy Wins Frank O’Connor Award for Short Story Collection
British writer Simon Van Booy has won “the world’s richest short story prize”, the Frank O’Connor award, for his collection Love Begins in Winter. Van Booy, who lives in New York and is also the author of The Secret Lives…
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Reprinting the Public Domain, One Book at a Time
As you may already know, Google has been spending the last seven years scanning their hearts out, digitizing more than two million books that are old enough to be part of the public domain. They turn them into searchable documents,…