Features & Reviews
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More Crappy News for Short Story Writers
Mark Trainer publishes an excerpt of a note he received from a “thoughtful, well-respected agent” on his blog. “I have no confidence in being able to place a collection at this time in the world of publishing. Publishers don’t like…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs have went and gone political! Maybe it’s that it’s the off year in the election cycle and they miss the rabid infighting and corruption, or maybe it’s the news that the Kindle has already become…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
This week, Rumpus books reviews two novels, a book of short stories, and a collection of poetry. We’ve also got an interview with Rebecca Solnit, plus essays on Borges, Douglas Rushkoff and Leonardo Sinisgalli.
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The Fog of War
Robert Olmstead’s new novel demonstrates Robert E. Lee’s maxim: “It is well that war is so horrible, or we would grow to love it too much.”
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Fanzine Heart The Adderall Diaries
Michael Miller gives The Adderall Diaries, the new book by Rumpus editor Stephen Elliott, one hell of a review in Fanzine.
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A Paradise Built in Hell: The Rumpus Interview With Rebecca Solnit
To read one of [Solnit’s] books is to slap your forehead and say, “How could I, and everyone else, have missed this?”
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Some Buildings on the Skyline of the Past
It’s funny how memory works. Budd Schulberg’s death yesterday got me thinking about On the Waterfront and The Harder They Fall, which got me thinking about Hollywood, and Schulberg’s collaboration, when he was 24, with the down-on-his-luck F. Scott Fitzgerald. This…
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The Joys Of Overland Travel
In my opinion, the worst part about travelling is flying. It’s expensive, it’s boring, the food is awful, the people are usually not that interesting, the environmental and financial impact is profound and it takes a long, long time, especially…
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The Cost of a Thing
A couple months ago, we wrote about Matthew Crawford’s book Shop Class as Soulcraft, and around the same time I read another interesting review of the book, by Caleb Crain. (I refrained from posting about it at the time to…
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Searching the Library of Babel
About six months ago, as I was nearing the end of Jorge Luis Borges’ Selected Non-Fictions, I came across the chapter titled “Prologues to The Library of Babel.” The chapter began with a list of authors whose works were selected…