Features & Reviews
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The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup
Sometimes, the book blogs seem resigned to the idea that we’re entering some terrible dystopia, shaking their heads sadly as the businesspeople in charge douse the future in gasoline and dance around with a matchbook in their mouths. No longer.…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
Summer is coming. What will you be reading? Will it be that Henry James novel you’ve meant to read since 1987 or that book with the vampire-zombies with tantalizing unmentionables?
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Poetic Lives Online: Links by Jeremy Hatch
Rumpus contributor Michael Berger only just learned about Harold Norse, on June 8th; sadly, that was the day Norse died. Here’s a tribute page, and a page where Glenn Ingersoll takes off on a Norse poem. Mark Doty is spending…
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Naked People with Snakes
The Believer this month has a really good interview with designer / painter / comic arts legend Gary Panter — best known as the guy who did the sets for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, somewhat less well-known for his Jimbo comics, and…
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Robin Hemley’s Round File, in Verse
In the latest issue of Ninth Letter, Robin Hemley has a poem called “Rejected Book Ideas” that almost reads like a McSweeney’s list. It begins as follows
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{sound of cicadas}
Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir, A Drifting Life, chronicles the youth and career of a prominent graphic novelist.
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Unpublished foreword to William Wantling’s 7 on Style [circa 1974]
His writing didn’t contain the trickery and the sheen that the larger American poetry audience demands—and things never became easy for him, that’s why he continued to write very well.
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Caleb Crain Makes His Blog a Book
I’ll confess that I’d never heard of the wonderful blog Steamboats Are Ruining Everything until it made an appearance in book form. Yesterday I saw Levi Stahl’s post on Conversational Reading about the book that its author, Caleb Crain, made…
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The Rumpus Interview with Kate Christensen
At what point in a writer’s career does their writing become able to be characterized? I mean specifically the point where you get to add “ian” or “esque” at the end of someone’s name
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The Chronicles of Narcissists
Hal Niedzviecki explores the motives, technologies, and consequences of Peep Culture.
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The Myth of Mary and the Mother of God
We encounter images of the Virgin Mary constantly: in churches, tattoos, and local news stories reporting frequent visual manifestations of her iconic form.
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The Rumpus Long Interview with Dave Eggers
Dave Eggers discusses Zeitoun, his optimism for print publications, what the kids are reading, and the advantage of attending a state school.