Features & Reviews
-
How Not to Be Boring
Tim O’Brien has a really brilliant article in The Atlantic in which he argues that the biggest problem with “unsuccessful stories” is, to put it quite simply, that “they are boring.” I couldn’t agree more. O’Brien worries about the focus…
-
Glenn Beck is the New John Updike
“For the past nine months, ever since a certain somebody seized the White House, conservative pundits have dominated the ranks of nonfiction. … It would be easy enough, and rather predictable, to lament this state of affairs and to find…
-
The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Your humble Rumpus Sunday Editor is smitten. Over the last couple weeks, the book blogs have been in form, publishing intelligent, hilarious, insightful, and riveting posts. In a word, they’ve been brilliant. Some, but most certainly not all, of my…
-
The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
It’s been a real humdinger of a week at Rumpus Books. Come see what we have.
-
Don’t Miss the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival: Sunday September 13
Reasons to attend the 2009 Brooklyn Book Festival: 1) it’s one of the most hip, smart and diverse American literary events, 2) because Ben Marcus, Sarah Manguso, Thurston Moore, Heidi Julavits and Tao Lin are just some of the stars…
-
Where Celebrities Go to Die
Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Olen Butler takes a crack at the underworld in a hit-and-miss new novel.
-
The Adderall Diaries
The Adderall Diaries by Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott got a rave review in the Sunday San Francisco Chronicle. More on the official Adderall Diaries Page.
-
Google’s Book Search: Not Good for Academia?
We’ve covered the Google book settlement quite a lot recently. While we tend to focus on how the case affects authors, Geoffrey Nunberg, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, is looking past the settlement and examining what…
-
Raymond Carver: Vicarious Slumming for the WSJ
It’s Raymond Carver night at the Rumpus! Moments after I wrote and scheduled the preceding post, I saw this tweet from the Library of America: “WSJ on Raymond Carver: ‘There must be few story collections whose notes offer more melodrama…
-
David Ulin on the LOA’s Raymond Carver
“What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is stunningly desolate, a group of stories so laconic they almost perfectly reflect the resignation of characters struggling with alcoholism, infidelity and the desperation of diminished dreams… “Despite the book’s success,…
-
Poems for the Gmail Generation
Brandon Scott Gorrell’s debut collection, During My Nervous Breakdown I Want to Have a Biographer Present is an anxious, ambivalent ode to Internet culture.
-
The Evolution of On the Origin of Species
Science is fluid. Like everything else it progresses and evolves. Even Darwin’s On the Origin of Species transformed over the course of several editions. For example, “the phrase ‘survival of the fittest’ — usually considered central to the theory and…