Interviews & Reviews
Sarah Haas interviews Robert Lundy about his hybrid memoir Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness
"We are living myths, but we are also just living our humdrum domestic lives. It is a startling continuum."
Matthew Gasda reviews Albert Camus's Caligula and Three Other Plays
"The canon of drama remains closed to those who do not create a language of their own."
Vauhini Vara, interviewed by Madhushree Ghosh about her short story collection This is Salvaged
"I was fascinated by the line between order and disorder, control and chaos."
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Originals & Columns
Rumpus Original Fiction: "The Dollmaker" by Apoorva Bradshaw-Mitta
“If I were ever to go under a knife, I would ask them to begin with my throat, make their way down my body cutting away my breasts, my waist, my stomach, my thighs.”
Voices on Addiction: "Whole Pools of It" by Sarah Perret-Goluboff
"The voicemail is eighty-seven seconds long, and most of it is silence. Only at the very end does she call my name. For a desperate moment I think it is my mother, that somehow I had it all wrong and she has been further wasting away in the dust of Arizona, building herself into the sands."
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Carey Salerno
"“Firefly, sparrow, the / aphid–a hundred stuck against your chest, their cornicles, their honeydew, their slender / stretched mouthparts that would pierce the skin of everything set before them...” |
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THE RUMPUS presents: Small Press Sunday hosted by Janet Rodriguez!
Small Press Sunday is an inside look at the presses who make your favorite books, including interviews with publishers and editors and insight into why manuscripts are chosen and how books are ushered from submission to bookstore shelves. Our next indie press is Alice James Books!
Founded as a feminist press in 1973, Alice James Books is committed to collaborating with literary artists of excellence whose voices have been historically marginalized by producing, promoting, and distributing their work which often engages the public on important social issues. Alice James provides a platform from which to elevate exceptional literary artists and is dedicated to helping its writers achieve purposeful engagement with broad audiences and communities nationwide. We help writers tell their stories and connect with readers. We envision this work making continued contributions that sustain American literary and artistic culture and to growing a more understanding, equitable, and just community through literature.
Make sure to follow The Rumpus on Instagram and tune in on 10/1 at 3:30 pm PT/ 6:30pm ET so you don't miss a thing. |
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Show Us Your Desk with Greg Mania and Sarah Rose Etter
Our second installment of Show Us Your Desk hosted by Greg Mania will feature author Sarah Rose Etter on October 10 at 3pm PST / 6pm EST on Instagram Live! Don't forget to follow The Rumpus on Instagram and tune in to see where Sarah does her writing and hear her talk through her writing process. Sarah Rose Etter is the author of RIPE and The Book of X, winner of the 2019 Shirley Jackson Award. Her short fiction collection, Tongue Party, was selected by Deb Olin Unferth to be published as the winner of the 2011 Caketrain Award. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in TIME, Guernica, BOMB, Gulf Coast, The Cut, VICE, and more. She has been awarded residences at the Jack Kerouac House, the Disquiet International program in Portugal, and the Gullkistan Writing Residency in Iceland. In 2017, she was the keynote speaker at the Society for the Study of American Women Writers conference in Bordeaux, France, where she presented on surrealist writing as a mode of feminism. |
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For our September 2023 - August 2024 selections (and possibly beyond!), we’ll focus on great new poetry collections AND hear from the indie publishers behind the books with our new Indie x Indie Poetry Book Club format!
Join by midnight October 15th, to receive our November Poetry Book Club pick Orders of Service by Willie Lee Kinard III and join our subsciber-only conversation with author Willie Lee Kinard III, Carey Salerno, Executive Editor and Executive Director at Alice James Books, and Brian Spears, Rumpus Poetry Editor.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of October and you'll also be invited to an exclusive online video discussion with the book's author + the author's editor + a Rumpus Editor and fellow book club members. Subscribers are encouraged to join in the chat with their questions before and during the conversations. These will take place on the Rumpus' Crowdcast channel and will remain available to subscribers for 1 month after they take place.
About November's Poetry Book Club selection: As a young, Black, queer person in a small town in the South where everyone knows everyone, Orders of Service is a coming-of-age exploration of the everyday fever of fleeting relationships, while capturing the romantic, psychic quotidian of the Bible Belt.
“Willie Lee Kinard III’s astonishing debut collection braids mythology, sex and desire, gutbucket and gospel—defying outdated notions of bodies, binaries, the black church, and the natural world. These verses render testimonies so electric, you can’t help but shout. Kinard knows caring begins in language. He knows black boys crafted of fable can become sharp-witted and tender lovers and loving men. Orders of Service cuts so clean and deep you’ll find yourself several pages in before you notice blood on your fingers.”
—Yona Harvey
About November's featured indie press: Founded as a feminist press in 1973, Alice James Books is committed to collaborating with literary artists of excellence whose voices have been historically marginalized by producing, promoting, and distributing their work which often engages the public on important social issues. Alice James provides a platform from which to elevate exceptional literary artists and is dedicated to helping its writers achieve purposeful engagement with broad audiences and communities nationwide. We help writers tell their stories and connect with readers. We envision this work making continued contributions that sustain American literary and artistic culture and to growing a more understanding, equitable, and just community through literature. |
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 | HYBRID |October 9, 6 PM
Malaprops Bookstore, Asheville, NC
The Rumpus co-presents Good Women: Halle Hill in Conversation with Diamond Forde Join The Rumpus IRL(or virtually) for a conversation with Halle Hill and Diamond Forde about Hill's debut story collection, Good Women from Hub City Press.
In her debut, Halle Hill’s Good Women delves into the lives of twelve Black women across the Appalachian South. A woman boards a Greyhound bus barreling toward Florida to meet her sugar daddy’s mother; a state fair employee considers revenge on a local preacher; a sister struggles with guilt as she helps her brother plan to run away with a man he's seeing in secret; a young woman who works for a scam for-profit college navigates the lies she sells for a living. Darkly funny and deeply human, Good Women observes how place, blood-ties, generational trauma, obsession, and boundaries—or lack thereof—influence how we navigate our small worlds, and how those worlds so often collide in ways we don’t expect. Through intimate moments of personal choice, Hill carefully shines a light on how these twelve women shape and form themselves through faith and abandon, transgression and conformity, community, caution, and solitude. |
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| Letters in the Mail (from authors!) |
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Letters in the Mail from authors is a Rumpus subscription in which you receive an actual, postmarked letter from one of our favorite writers in your IRL mailbox twice a month. All letters are non-promotional, include a creative prompt, and have a return mailing address in case you'd like to write the author back!
Up next, author letters from . . .
October 1: Ling Ma is a writer hailing from Fujian, Utah, and Kansas. She wrote the novel Severance and the story collection Bliss Montage. Her fiction has been awarded the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, the Whiting Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and others. She lives in Chicago with her family. (subscribe by September 30)
October 15: Kelly Sather is the author of the short story collection SMALL IN REAL LIFE, selected by Deesha Philyaw for the 2023 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. The book invokes the myth and melancholy of L.A. glamour, of starry-eyed women and men striving for their own Hollywood shimmer no matter the consequences. Her stories and interviews have appeared in publications including Santa Monica Review, Pembroke Magazine, J Journal, PANK, and on ZYZZYVA. (subscribe by October 14) |
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| Featured Partner or Sponsor |
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Interested in advertising in The Rumpus e-newsletter or on therumpus.net? Contact Monica at ads@therumpus.net. |
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Reader Support Keeps The Rumpus Going! |
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| Founded in 2009 in San Francisco, CA and now based in Asheville, NC with readers and editors all over the US and abroad, The Rumpusis one of the longest-running independent online literary and culture magazines. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love. Often, we are an emerging writer's first notable publication, which is something we’re really proud of. We believe that literature builds community—and if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! Our Membership and subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, help keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability. |
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