titles
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Sarah Blake
Sarah Blake discusses her new collection, Let’s Not Live on Earth, questions in poems, monsters, and the challenge of writing a dystopia.
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The Rumpus Interview with Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll discusses his newest collection Transitory, the influence of film on his writing, and getting good news at bad times.
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The Working Titles of Classic Lit
While the great classics studied in classrooms everywhere tend to have very memorable titles, those classics could have received slightly different treatment had their working titles been used instead. Over at Electric Literature, Carrie Mullins looks at several classics whose titles changed before publication.
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What Do You Call It?
Book titles are an essential component of the texts they gesture at. They’re also advertising. At Catapult, Hannah Gersen recounts the naming process for her novel Home Field: A short story title can be fanciful or obscure or may even contribute something…
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Jonterri Gadson
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Jonterri Gadson about Blues Triumphant, her love of editing, and the intersection of poetry and comedy.
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What’s in a Name?
If there are indeed an infinite number of universes, it’s nice to think there might be one where all of the books we have come to know bear their original, author-intended titles. For the Paris Review, Tony Tulathimutte pulls back…
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How to Title Your Next Novel
What patterns, dreams, and desires lie hidden within the ostensible hook of a novel’s title? Dustin Illingworth, for Lit Hub, explores the keys to a successful book title after considering, among others, The Sun Also Rises. They include not using the word “Trimalchio,” and…
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Writing, Titling, Tricoloning
Greek for “of equal number of clauses,” isocolon is a rhetorical device that produces a sense of order by balancing parallel elements that are similar in structure and length within a sentence. An isocolon need not have three elements, but…
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American Book Cover in Paris (and Lots of Other Foreign Places)
SF Gate has a neato slideshow comparing American book covers to their foreign editions. Sometimes they change barely at all (Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones), while sometimes they’re unrecognizable—Maggie Shipstead’s Seating Arrangements gets not only a visual redesign but a whole new…
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No One Belongs Here More Than My Therapist’s Wife
It’s funny, I love Miranda July’s stories but Gordon Haber at Bookslut is insightful about her varied titles: “We Are Vaguely Included seems to show the influence of Miranda July, who has demonstrated talent in numerous genres while consistently formulating…
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The Blurb #14: The Land of Underwater Birds
What makes a good title? The Great Gatsby is one for the ages—but it wasn’t Fitzgerald’s idea. He wanted to call his novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss dreamed up for The Playboy Channel.
