Features & Reviews
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The Bard in the Basement
Today marks the 400th anniversary of the release, by publisher Thomas Thorpe, of Shakespeare’s sonnets. A new book by Clinton Heylin, called So Long as Men Can Breathe: The Untold Story of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, questions whether the marvelously crafted poems…
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The Solipsist and the Internet (a review of Helprin’s Digital Barbarism)
Exactly two years ago today, the New York Times published an op-ed about copyright by a novelist.
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A Faithful Grope in the Dark
Are marketing departments running the major publishing houses? Do editors and agents know what they’re doing? Are small presses the future of literature? Is everything a crapshoot? What’s a first-time novelist to do?
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“Inch of ocean, pinch of face”
Like the razor-edged minimalism of Robert Creeley, the rich ontology of these poems, where the content and form eloquently match, communicates carefully into the reader’s memory.
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The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup
Sometimes, the Rumpus makes fun of the book blogs, especially when they write about whether William Shatner would beat James T. Kirk in a fight to the death. But this week is different. This week, the blogs are acting like…
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Sexual Healing?
Women are nasty. They piss, and fart, and masturbate. They clean toilet seats with their vaginas and pull out tampons with barbeque tongs.
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The Last Book I Loved: City of Thieves
The last book I loved is CITY OF THIEVES by David Benioff. I loved it for a simple, yet powerful reason: it transported me. I was on a 15.5 hour flight to Hong Kong and I read the novel in…
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Journal Highlight: Conjunctions and the New Weird, a Non-Genre
Conjunctions: 52, Betwixt the Between, its Spring 2009 issue, has just been released. According to the Editors’ Note, the issue explores what happens when the “borderlands of the normal and absurd…are breached.” This breach is bare in Secret Breathing Techniques,…
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THE LONELY VOICE #4: John Edgar Wideman Confronts
Some stories cut so close you can only tell them in shards.
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The Last Book I Loved: Bleak House
Bleak House is a magnificent book, surprising and delightful and heartbreaking and wild.
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I’ve Always Wondered Where The Black Hats
Get their black hats. Same place as Gay Talese. Homburgs, fedoras, no creases, creases — Bruno Lacorazza is a name you can trust. Hasidic hats even get hasidic-ish style names: yeshivish (generic fedora) and shtreimel (fancy and furry)!
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Exquisite Corpses
San Francisco Chronicle columnist Mark Morford’s Facebook status messages are queries for the world, not just for his friends. In a special Rumpus bricolage, we are pleased to present Ariane Conrad’s take on the brilliant Slow Poetry of Morford’s Wall.