An Author’s Experience of Cover Design
Earlier this month, the subject of book cover design, and who the final design should speak to, blipped across the blogs for a day or so after Seth Godin reasonably opined…
Features & Reviews
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Infinite Summer Roundup
I’ve been collecting articles and links connected to the Infinite Summer challenge, and Infinite Jest itself, and three weeks in seems like a good time to share them: if you’d like…
The Rumpus Long Interview with Jessica Anthony
Jessica Anthony’s first novel, The Convalescent (McSweeney’s Books) is the first recipient of McSweeney’s Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award. It’s about a really short guy who sells meat out of…
Novel Tweets
Matt Stewart is hoping to make history this Bastille Day by becoming the first author (“as far as he can tell”) to publish his entire full-length novel via Twitter. The…
Why I Write
A 20 page essay on “Why I Write” by Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott. Part memoir/part tips and insight. $3 from Scribd, read online or download. (He says he’s going to…
Shya Scanlon Experiments with Web Serialization
Beginning this Thursday, Shya Scanlon will be serializing his sci-fi novel, Forecast, in semi-weekly installments across 42 web journals and blogs. Forecast is a sci-fi tale of relationships and identity…
Blogging for Book Deals
What do Look at this Fucking Hipster, Postcards from Yo Momma, Stuff White People Like, I Can Has Cheezburger, and Barack Obama is Your New Bicycle, have in common (you…
The Magic Hour
Reading such a dense novel can feel like being in the backseat of a car traveling nonstop through a safari, with a reader wanting to stop and poke around a…
The Un-formulaic Life of the Man Who Invented the Movie Formula
Wycliffe A. Hill is the grandfather of the cookie cutter Hollywood movie. Author of Ten Million Photoplay Plots: The Master Key to All Dramatic Plots, which was published in 1919,…
The Worst Words Ever
“What word do you hate and why?” That was the question posed to poets this year at the Ledbury Poetry Festival. Answers ranged from chillax (ugh) to redact (yuck) to…
Monkeys Know Bad Grammar When They Hear It
It’s not like they’re gonna be writing for The New Yorker anytime soon, but a team of scientists just published a study in the journal Biology Letters saying that monkeys…
The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
It’s summertime. BookExpo is in the past. Writers have taken a little break from accosting critics. The book blogs finally have some free time. And like most people, they are…