Living Memory Keepers: Talking with Alicia Elliott
Alicia Elliott discusses her essay collection, A MIND SPREAD OUT ON THE GROUND.
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Posts Tagged: melville house
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jesse Ball
Jesse Ball discusses his new novel, Census, the inherent sinister nature of institutions, and creating imaginary authors.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #63: Patrick Madden
Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He pays close attention to the details of the every day, infusing humor and self-deprecation, combining […]
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The Rumpus interview with Jeremy P. Bushnell
Jeremy P. Bushnell discusses his new novel, The Insides, themes of consent, and designing a post-apocalyptic board game.
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The Rumpus Interview with Adam Morris
Adam Morris discusses Quiet Creature on the Corner, a novel he translated from the Brazilian by João Gilberto Noll, the choices he makes as a translator, and the unique narrative structure of Noll’s writing.
...moreGood Sex (Writing)
If you aren’t yet familiar with the annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award… you’re welcome. The Erotic Review, however, thinks we should celebrate good sex writing instead, according to Ryan Harrington at Melville House. To that end, the editors are in the process of establishing a Good Sex in Fiction Award. Hopefully, Harrington notes, the award will […]
...moreTrolls Gonna Troll
We don’t like being told “no.” At least not according to preliminary votes from Oxford Dictionaries’ attempt to collect data on English speakers’ least favorite words in late August. Unfortunately, while the publishers of the OED did get a number of legitimate responses, they shut down the contest after one day because Internet users can’t help […]
...moreThe Worst Slush Pile
Until recently in Romania, prisoners could reduce their sentences by thirty days for each “book of scientific value” they wrote while behind bars. Now one man, who went to prison for fraud, is being accused of plagiarism by a woman who says one of the books he wrote reads eerily like her dissertation. He may not be […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Martin Seay
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Martin Seay about his debut novel The Mirror Thief, the Great Work of alchemy, researching optical prosthetics, and keeping plot lines straight in a 600-page novel.
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The Rumpus Interview with Christopher Boucher
Novelist Christopher Boucher talks about writing so-called “experimental” fiction, both embracing and denying the metaphor, and apples.
...moreMaking History Discoverable
Backlist is a new service meant to connect readers and students to curated lists of history books put together by scholars. The site’s founders solicit book lists and recommendations from scholars and historians, with a goal of exposing people to books they may not have heard of otherwise: It’s like going into the office of your […]
...moreTalking Philosophy With Philip K. Dick
Melville House has just published a collection of interviews of the late Philip K. Dick. Head over to their website to read an excerpt from the last interview the author ever gave, to Gregg Rickman, shortly before his death.
...moreDistrict of Books
The American city that spends the most money on books, magazines, and newspapers—Washington, DC—will soon be left without any chain bookstores. Melville House reports that as of Dec. 31, 2015, there will no longer be any chain bookstores in the nation’s capital. “… [T]he closure of this particular Barnes & Noble doesn’t mean Amazon has stolen the hearts […]
...moreWWLBD?
There’s always Stephen’s classic hangover cure, “The Cabman’s Kickstart.” Simply stare with weary ennui at a stale dinner roll while insulting a cup of coffee. Over at Melville House, resident Joyce expert and author of An Exaggerated Murder, Josh Cook, is impersonating Ulysses’s hero, Leopold Bloom, and answering your most distressing questions in a new monthly advice […]
...moreClaudia Rankine Takes the Stage
My stage adaptation of Citizen is not a play. In addition to winning the National Book Critics Circle for poetry, Claudia Rankine’s modern genre-bending classic Citizen is now being adapted for the stage. Melville House has the whole story.
...moreTextbook Crisis in India Turns Violent
A massive delay in textbook printing in India’s southern state of Kerala has led to accusations of corruption in the government education ministry and violent protests. Government officials suggested schools print the books themselves, but for low-income areas this solution is impossible because of its high cost. Millions of textbooks have yet to be printed and […]
...moreThe Laws of War
Government documents aren’t exactly page-turners, making hefty tombs like the 74,000 page tax code and the 33,000 page Obamacare law unlikely additions to any summer beach reading lists. The 1,200 page Department of Defense Law of War Manual might seem comparatively short, until you realize its a document that defines every military procedure from the […]
...moreAmazon: The Root of Book Littering?
The strange case of the “Literature Litterbug”—a mystery perp who’s been dumping used books along a Colorado highway for a year or more—has come to a close, bringing with it a pun-filled police report and plenty of finger-pointing. Glenn Plasden admits that the littering citation was “by the book,” and explains that he simply couldn’t […]
...moreBooks Without Books
If you’re old enough to remember VHS cassettes, its likely you also remember the revolutionary straight-to-video category of movies. Now, Audible wants to do the same for literature with straight-to-audiobooks. Audible, an Amazon subsidiary, is a key player in the billion-dollar audiobook industry and currently has 30 books in the works as audiobook originals.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
To help us cope with the passing of Leonard Nimoy, Melville House shared audio recordings of the baritone-voiced Vulcan reading excerpts from Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man. The find is definitely worth a listen, and in this newly revived age of plans for Mars missions, the excerpts of this creative duo […]
...moreBook Furniture
A designer in Hong Kong has developed a book-based furniture system. Bookniture, as creator Mike Mak has called it, folds neatly into a book when not in use, but open it up and the unique honeycomb shape creates a stool, a seat, a nightstand, or a table. The project is still in the Kickstarter phase, but […]
...moreThe Real Life of the Writer
We are quite happy to view images of writers’ desks and read features on ‘Where I Write’. Very different would be to see ‘Where I Sleep’ or ‘Where I Park the Car’; ‘Where I store the extra loo roll’. Of course, it’s not as interesting . . . but it does mean we fail to […]
...moreBooks on Television
Television is a great way to sell books. Oprah’s Book Club is the best known example, but Edan Lepucki‘s bestselling debut California certainly owed some of its success to the Colbert Bump. But The Colbert Report has ended, and Jon Stewart, another populist book advocate, is leaving The Daily Show. So where does that leave […]
...moreBooks Save Lives
You know all those movies in which a character is shot in the chest, only to be miraculously saved by a pocket Bible, and everyone in the audience rolls their eyes? Well, it turns out that books actually are bulletproof—to a certain extent. At Melville House, Liam O’Brien delves into the history, fact, and fiction […]
...moreZuckerberg is No Oprah
The first meeting of the Facebook book club was a little like Fight Club: nobody talked about it. Perhaps it was Zuckerberg’s choice of book—The End of Power by Moisés Naím—or maybe he simply doesn’t have the cultural cachet of Oprah, but Zuckerberg’s post only garnered 240 questions and 137 comments. That might seem like […]
...moreWorthwhile Work
Dissatisfaction among the modern white-collar working class might stem from the fact that many jobs simply don’t feel necessary. Strike! Magazine has been advertising on the London Underground with quotes from David Graeber’s 2013 essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs,” in which he claims many jobs feel like they’ve been created simply to keep […]
...moreWho Robbed Mark Twain’s Grave?
Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s, a dastardly criminal (or Mark Twain superfan) stole a bronze plaque of Twain’s profile from his gravestone in Elmira, N.Y. At Melville House, former Elmira resident Alex Shephard examines the city’s complicated relationship with its literary past—and swears that, although he was home for Christmas, he didn’t do it.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
With the Senate Intelligence Committee’s online release of their Torture Report summary and Melville House’s announcement last week that it will publish a bound copy of the summary report at the end of this year, torture has been in the air. Even before that, though, the murmurings of what has been going on at Guantánamo […]
...moreThe Return of Judy Blume
Judy Blume is back—at least for grown ups. Next summer, for the first time in 15 years, Judy Blume will release a novel aimed at adult readers. Melville House has the story.
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