| This week on The Rumpus
*and scroll down for AWP bonuses! |
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Interviews & Reviews
Amanda Hawkins interviews Lisa Olstein about Dream Apartment
"Poems themselves are dream apartments. They’re an unordinary pocket of time and space in which we discover things we didn’t know we knew..."
Emily McBride reviews Balsam Karam's The Singularity
“It is a story of losses handed down from mothers to daughters and of the echoes that violence and displacement exert from one generation to another.”
Jung Hae Chae interviews Ani Gjika about An Unruled Body
"I think no matter what genre I write in, I find myself deeply listening."
Éric Morales-Franceschini reviews Ana Portnoy Brimmer's To Love an Island
“Our love should make us quake, quake like a storm, a storm that tears down ’the whole blood-marbled edifice.’” |
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| In my debut novel, A Fire So Wild, a wildfire creeps toward Berkeley, California, and three families from different walks of life are forced to reckon with the cracks in the lives they’ve built and confront the injustices lying under the city’s surface. It is a love letter to our precious planet and an urgent call for us all to question our own complicity in its destruction. If you’re into books that explore the environmental collapse we are all living through—and push us to challenge the systems sustaining the stark inequities that undergird it—these are for you.
—Sarah Ruiz-Grossman, "What to Read When the World is on Fire" |
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The Rumpus at AWP 2024
in Kansas City, MO
Feb. 8-10 If you're in Kansas City for AWP right now (or live there already!), we hope to see you at our event happening tonight! Ticketing link below. Advance ticket sales end at NOON CST. Any remaining tix will be first come, first serve. It is possible we'll run out.
We're also tabling at the Book Fair (#1707) and offering only-at-AWP sign up bonus gifts for readers who become new Rumpus Members, join the Poetry Book Club, or subscribe to Letters in the Mail from authors. |
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| New Member AWP Sign up BONUS! |
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| To become a member: 1. Scan a QR code at the RUMPUS TABLE (#1707, by the escalators!) OR sign up on your own between now and 4 pm on Saturday. 2. Show your confirmation/email receipt at the table.
3. Pick a mug, poster, or stickers of your choice! |
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| AWP signup bonuses for new Poetry Book Club and Letters in the Mail subscriptions! |
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1. Scan a QR code at the RUMPUS TABLE (#1707, by the escalators!) OR sign up on your own (links below) between now and 4 pm on Saturday.
2. Show your confirmation/email receipt at the table.
- Pick a bonus book to take home from the book bin
- OR 2 free stickers
- Send a bonus Letter to a friend/contact of your choice! You can either take a letter home with you to mail or add the mailing address to the letter and we’ll mail it on your behalf from KC.
- OR 2 free stickers
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Advance ticket sales end TODAY/Friday at NOON CST. Any remaining tix will be first come, first serve. Cash or Venmo accepted.
It is possible we'll run out of space. Doors open at 5 PM. Event begins promptly at 5:30 pm. *Please note that there is an event directly before us, so we will need to clear the room between events. The event after ours is free and open to the public. |
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| Next up in our Indie x Indie
POETRY BOOK CLUB:
Hatch by Jenny Irish
x Curbstone Books |
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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 Feb. 15, to receive our March Poetry Book Club pick Hatch by Jenny Irish and join our subsciber-only conversation with author Jenny Irish and Curbstone Books editor Marisa Siegel.
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 March's Poetry Book Club selection: The prose poems in Jenny Irish’s newest collection, Hatch, trace the consciousness of an artificial womb that must confront the role she has played in the continuation of the dying of the human species. Hatch's apocalyptic vision engages with the most pressing concerns of our moment: reproductive rights and climate crises, gender and race bias in healthcare and technology, disinformation and the ominous promises of artificial intelligence. Irish conducts an autopsy on the aspects of American experience that could have served as catalyst for action, but did not. Part elegy, part prophecy, Hatch is a feminist hybrid narrative that casts a surgical light on our present and ahead to our future.
“Jenny Irish’s vibrant use of language and imagery makes each page of Hatch sing. She can turn a sentence into a shiv, a paragraph into a punch. This collection is a deep, surprising, chilling — yet, somehow, also really fun — look at who we are as humans, at what we’ve done to the earth and each other, and at where the future may lead us (or, perhaps more accurately, how we as humans may impact the future of all life on the planet).” — Gayle Brandeis, author of Many Restless Concerns
About December's featured indie press: Founded in 1893, Northwestern University Press publishes works of enduring scholarly and cultural value, extending the university’s mission to a community of readers throughout the world. The Press has an international reputation for publishing translations of scholarly work as well as fiction, drama, and poetry. Curbstone Books is an imprint of N
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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 . . .February 15: Marisa Crawford is the author of the poetry collections The Haunted House, Reversible, and, most recently, DIARY (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023). She is the editor of The Weird Sister Collection (Feminist Press, 2024), and co-editor, with Megan Milks, of We Are The Baby-Sitters Club. Marisa is the creator of Weird Sister, a website and organization that explores the intersections of feminism, literature, and pop culture, and co-host of the 90s rock podcast All Our Pretty Songs. She lives in New York. Subscribe by Feb. 14!March 1: Mako Yoshikawa is the author of the novels One Hundred and One Waysand Once Removed. Her memoir Secrets of the Sun: A Memoir is forthcoming this month. Her essays have been published in LitHub, Harvard Review, Southern Indiana Review, Missouri Review, and Best American Essays, among other places. Yoshikawa attended Columbia University, received a Masters in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama at Lincoln College, Oxford, and has a Ph.D. in literature from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She is a professor of creative writing and director of the creative writing graduate program at Emerson College. She lives in Boston and Baltimore. Subscribe by Feb. 29! |
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| Comics is open for new submissions now until March 31.
Essays are open now until Feb. 28 for new work.
We're now accepting submission for our Enough column from Feb. 1-29.
We are open for Funny Women and Book Reviews submissions year-round.
(Reminder, annual Rumpus Members can submit their work in any genre all year long.) |
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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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