Rumpus Original Fiction: The Basement
Looking back, it feels like I knew.
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Posts Tagged: iowa
Thrown Off Balance: Talking with Malinda McCollum
Malinda McCollum discusses her debut story collection, THE SURPRISING PLACE.
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Poetry Is a Manifestation of a Life: Talking with Marvin Bell
Poet Marvin Bell discusses his now-famous love poem, “To Dorothy,” and the woman who inspired it.
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It’s Fine, It’s Good, It’s Beautiful
And the trees—each positioned in corner windows in the front of the house—they will be the talk of the neighborhood. This is how a house becomes a home.
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All My Visits from Santa
Confession: I’m a Hindu who loves Christmas.
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Endless Preparation: Apples and Women’s Work
It makes sense to me that Johnny Appleseed, a man, would travel God’s earth spreading his profligate seed. And then women are doomed to their lives trying to make that seed into something useful.
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Chewing Rocks: A Conversation with David Biespiel
David Biespiel discusses his new book, The Education of a Young Poet, being comfortable in uncertainty, and extending moments in writing.
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Internal Combustion
I start talking late, making word-sounds with my throat long before I open my mouth. When my lips and tongue begin to unfreeze, the progression of brain cancer locks my grandfather’s jaw in place.
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At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar
American writers have a long, distinguished history of calling out injustice.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
The Guardian looks at how an Australian feminist bookstore took on MRA trolls. Two Dollar Radio, a Columbus-based independent publisher, plans to open a bookstore. A community bookstore in Amman, Jordan that charged a pay-what-you-can fee for books nearly went bankrupt, but was saved by crowdfunding from around the world.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Nikki Wallschlaeger
Nikki Wallschlaeger discusses her new collection Crawlspace, why she chose to work with the sonnet form, and how segregation in American never ended.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #86: Max Allan Collins
In April, the Mystery Writers of America named Max Allan Collins a Grand Master, the organization’s peer-voted lifetime achievement award. Collins has had a prolific and often eclectic career. The Iowa Writers Workshop graduate has written more than one hundred books, has had a long career as a comics writer including, most famously, the Road to […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #78: Conceived as a Playlist
Shadowbahn […] is among the most unusual, and most extreme, in a literary career that has often been marked by its unpredictability.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
As Barnes & Noble prepares to leave Bronx, New York, an independent store is already being planned by the winner of New York Public Library’s New York StartUP! Business Competition. Only Prime Members receive Amazon’s insane discounts in the store’s physical locations. An upstate New York bookstore wins its battle to display anti-Trump signage. An […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Brian Booker
Brian Booker discusses his debut collection Are You Here For What I’m Here For?, giving characters strange and unusual names, and sleeping sickness.
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Boy of My Youth
In my desperate attempts to keep my secret I learned to shut everyone out, to become as closed as a fist.
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The Rumpus Interview with Blair Braverman
Blair Braverman discusses her latest book, Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North, gendered travel narratives, and the pressure to write about personal trauma.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Suit
It was as if he understood that the authentic must begin in the voice. And through the texture of the voice—its moral and psychological claims—sensory details emerge with absolute authority.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Not That Town
Times like those lead you to believe that writing is, before it’s anything else, about simply getting it straight.
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #18: A Valentine: Fab Books by Fab Lit Citizens
I’m just back from Iowa, writing about the Democratic Caucus for Salon. You know what will make you think about citizenry? Watching hundreds of working-class union members standing in the harsh wind and freezing rain waiting to get in to a Hillary Clinton rally in an overheated high school gym in Cedar Rapids. Watching them […]
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I Don’t See You
When I was younger, through the grace of a small business loan, my father started his own grocery store on the East Side of Waterloo. As I grew up, I eventually learned what the West and East sides of town meant.
...moreThe Rumpus Original Combo with Justin Torres
Justin Torres has had a lot of jobs. He worked on a farm. He walked dogs. He drove a truck, picking up donations around New England. He even had a stint at Brainwash, folding laundry. Thankfully, along the way he began writing, and his debut novel We the Animals was released in September.
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