Houston

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    Are great bookstores just good capitalism? People are more concerned with being fat than with eating disorders, if we go by the number of books in each respective section at one blogger’s local bookstore. A Tennessee bookstore will include a…

  • Finding Shelter

    Finding Shelter

    A hurricane is coming. Rita is in the Gulf of Mexico and is approaching Houston at a slow but steady pace of nine miles an hour. I don’t have many, or any, illusions that God and Jesus will see us…

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    Books Are Magic opens in Brooklyn, making Emma Straub the latest author to open a bookstore. Turkish police arrested seven teachers at a bookstore in a raid against dissent. A Houston bookstore celebrated indie bookstore day with drunk coloring.

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    You’ll never believe this amazing sales technique! A bookstore is making clickbait headlines from classic novel plots. Bustle highlights some unconventional bookstores around the world. April 29 is Independent Bookstore Day and a Seattle area store is issuing a challenge to…

  • Rumpus Original Fiction: Bob and Dave

    Rumpus Original Fiction: Bob and Dave

    The threat of perfunctory conversation looms. Raza reaches for his headphones, but it is too late. The man is already talking to him.

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    Best-selling author James Patterson is handing out bonuses to bookstore employees once again, celebrating the people who make best-selling authors possible. The Daily Beast has a roundup of some of the best independent bookstores across the country. As if you…

  • David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Defeat

    David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Defeat

    It never occurred to me to try to write poems without the guidance of other poets and poems.

  • This Week in Indie Bookstores

    James Patterson is giving away $2,000,000 in holiday bonuses to bookstore workers and libraries. An adults-only sex shop in Anchorage, Alaska is getting remade into an indie bookstore. Philadelphia’s Hakim’s Bookstore, a landmark African-American shop, is a small business on…

  • David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Against Our Will

    David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Against Our Will

    All that floated there was the mystery. In the presence of all that, I discovered too that there are mysteries residing in the consciousness of my own mind that I don’t want to get out of the way of.

  • Roots and Ragtime

    John Jeremiah Sullivan and Joel Finsel chronicle the rise, fall, and in-between wanderings of Houstonian booksellers, civil rights activists, reporters, and musicians—in oversized, Texan fashion. Most people have heard of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, canonical English poet and laudanum addict. Far…

  • The Rumpus Interview with Thomas H. McNeely

    The Rumpus Interview with Thomas H. McNeely

    Thomas H. McNeely discusses coming of age in the 1970s, Houston’s complicated racial history, and his new novel Ghost Horse.

  • Ghost Horse Wins Award

    Congratulations to Rumpus reviewer Thomas H. McNeely for winning the 9th Annual Gival Press Novel Award! The winning novel, Ghost Horse, tells “the story of a boy’s journey to escape an abusive relationship with his father and to discover the truth about his…