Books
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Chris Corrigan: The Last Book I Loved, The Little Prince
I read The Little Prince with a broken heart and deep new scars from recent chest surgery. The surgery didn’t remove the cracked and sad organ from beneath my ribs, but rather cut off the two useless mounds of flesh…
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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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Why Does No One Write About Their Day Job?
In a manifesto (er, “ideas piece”) about the importance of the workplace in writing, Alain de Botton calls on contemporary writers to write about work. “If a proverbial alien landed on earth,” he says, “and tried to figure out what human…
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This Book Stinks
Apparently, Marina Fiorato’s new novel The Madonna of the Almonds has a complementary perfume designed to smell like Renaissance Italy, the setting of her book. This strikes me as either ingenius or idiotic —probably both— and may just be another reminder…
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Shame Makes Us Who We Are
Anyone who has ever been in a creative writing workshop knows the type of shame ordinarily suffered only by lifestyle submissives. And in the new Bookforum, Mark Grief, while reviewing Mark McGurl’s The Program Era, plays with McGurl’s idea that…
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Can’t Tell Me Nothing
The Rumpus doesn’t really do Kanye West. It doesn’t hate him and it doesn’t love him. It just doesn’t go there. But when the self-proclaimed “voice of this generation“— in an interview for the release of his book, no less…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
Finished with the BEA? Had the best time of your life at You’re Not Alone, the Rumpus, McSweeney’s and SMITHMAG event last night in New York, and not sure how you could ever top the experience?
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This Book Will Self Destruct in 5-4-3…
“Books ought to be so cheap that we can throw them away if we do not like them, or give them away if we do. Moreover, it is absurd to print every book as if it were fated to last…
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The Rumpus Book Blog Roundup
The book blogs are in a tizzy! One second, it doesn’t look good for literature. The cancer has spread. The postmortem is imminent. But then all of the sudden they are saying everything is fine and pointing us in the…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
Greetings! I am Seth, the new Sunday Rumpus Editor. My first act ever in this position will be to recap this week’s book reviews, so that you can start your hangover by reading the reviews you missed and re-reading the…
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Beyond the Pleasure Principle: One Woman’s Reading History
When I started reading as a child, it was an immoderate, late-night indulgence of sweaty palmed, pupil-dilating gluttony. Books were a drug, and civilized society was the pusher. And I got really really high.
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Paterson’s Great Falls, inspiration for writers, named national park
President Barack Obama signed legislation on Monday naming the Great Falls on the Passaic River in Paterson, N.J. a national historic park. The 77-foot falls, site of early American industrial plants, has also inspired American writers. The great 20th century…