| This Week from The Rumpus |
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| Interviews with Anita Felicelli, Sarah Chihaya, Matthew Nienow, and Lidia Yuknavitch Reviews of Augusto Monterroso's The Rest is Silence and Aj Romriell's Wolf Act Sophie Madeline Dess discusses the publication of her debut novelWhat You Make of Me for The First Book Gabrielle Spear turns an eye toward genocide in new Poetry Benedetto Maniscalco snorts human remains in a new Essay What to Read When You Walking Through a Graveyard One last day to subscribe to Letters in the Mail to receive a note from Ethan Rutherford 2 weeks left to submit to The Rumpus PRIZE and calls for submission New Rumpus 📚 > 🤖 BOOKS OVER BOTS tote bags in collaboration with Pilsen Community Books! Pre-orders ship Feb. 27 |
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Interviews & Reviews
“I’m interested in the coast as a kind of threshold to entering what’s mysterious and uncontainable . . . ”
Ursula Villarreal-Moura interviews Anita Felicelli about How We Know Our Time Travelers.
“Like the reader, he has read through a book that purportedly celebrates a great man, while achieving the total opposite.”
Colm McKenna reviews Augusto Monterroso’s The Rest is Silence.
“For many of us, every intellectual project is also an emotional project.”
Susan Devan Harness interviews Sarah Chihaya about Bibliophobia.
“A book in which the sacred and the profane are hidden in each other’s disguises.”
Jendi Reiter reviews AJ Romriell’s Wolf Act.
“I’m interested in transformation rather than redemption.”
Charlotte Fleming interviews Matthew Nienow about If Nothing.
“If this novel were to be opened and shaken, every book I’ve ever read and every work of art I’ve ever seen would fall out.”
Sophie Madeline Dess discusses the publication of her debut novel What You Make of Me for The First Book.
“I’m tracking the way we carry stories of what happened to us around in our lives and our bodies.”
Chelsea Voulgares interviews Lidia Yuknavitch about Reading the Waves. |
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New Essays & Columns
“It is easy to do, as far as overriding the synapses firing in your brain telling you that you shouldn’t, but the actual snorting is hard.”
Rumpus Original Essay: "On Snorting Human Remains" by Benedetto Maniscalco
“In a tourist economy conceived from settler colonialism, / souvenir shops boast apartheid memorabilia.”
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Gabrielle Spear
“Both whales were confirmed to be *drumroll* male.”
Rumpus Original Comic: "Whale Sex" by Jay Aja |
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2 weeks left to submit to the
RUMPUS PRIZE for
Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction! |
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Announcing the inaugural Rumpus Prize for Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Nonfiction!
Submissions are open December 5, 2024 to March 2, 2025. The Rumpus has a long history of championing emerging and established poets, fiction writers, and essayists, and we’re pleased to announce a new way the magazine will bring attention to great writing.
All submissions will be read by The Rumpus‘s editorial team, and our final judges will be Kaveh Akbar (Poetry), Rachel Khong (Fiction), and Megan Stielstra (Creative Nonfiction).
The Rumpus Prize offers $3,600 total in prizes, with $1,000 awarded for 1st place prize and publication in 3 genres: poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction. Honorable mentions receive $200 and publication in each of the 3 genres.
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What to Read When Walking Through a Graveyard |
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"Maybe the best way to go about this is to ask you to imagine you’re walking through a graveyard, and each book listed below is a tombstone. Imagine: inscribed stone—standing or planted, mossed over or newly-minted, ambitiously real and maddeningly symbolic..."
—Emilio Carrero, What to Read When Walking Through a Graveyard |
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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, an author letter from . . .
February 15: Ethan Rutherford’s fiction has appeared in BOMB, Tin House, Electric Literature, Ploughshares, One Story, American Short Fiction, Conjunctions, and The Best American Short Stories. He is the author of two story collections—Farthest South (Deep Vellum, 2020) and The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories (Ecco, 2013)—and for these works has been named a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, a finalist for the John Leonard Prize and CLMP’s Firecracker Award, received honorable mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and was the winner of a Minnesota Book Award. Born in Seattle, Washington, he received his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Minnesota and now teaches Creative Writing at Trinity College. He lives in Hartford, Connecticut with his wife and two children. Subscribe by February 14! |
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| New Rumpus tote bags in collaboration with our friends at Pilsen Community Books! |
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| Introducing brand new Rumpus tote bags made in collaboration with the very fine worker-run bookstore Pilsen Community Books in Chicago. The first totes The Rumpus has made in over a decade!! Back in October, as those of us in Asheville, NC were still struggling with getting running water back after Hurricane Helene, Pilsen Community Books worker-owner and long-time friend, Mandy Medley, reached out to see if there was a way to help boost The Rumpus from afar. We spend so much time publishing new work that we don’t often have the resources or bandwidth to create new merch, so we came up with the idea of collaborating on a tote and commissioning Asheville-based artist Kyndra Sweep to create the illustrations and lettering for us. Net proceeds will be split evenly between Pilsen Community Books and The Rumpus. If you’re in the Chicago area, you can purchase totes in-person at the bookstore NOW.If you’re anywhere else in the U.S. (or it’s too cold to leave the house!) you can order HERE directly through The Rumpus store. Thank you for supporting human artists, writers, and workers. Books over bots, freethinkers over algorithms forever! —Alyson Sinclair, Publisher, The Rumpus |
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Our ceramic mug
NOW SHIPPING WORLDWIDE! |
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| Sometimes our international friends ask how they can order our classic "Write Like a Motherfucker" ceramic mug. Well, we now have an option for you to get them through Bonfire. Get one for yourself or your best overseas bud. Also available to US folks, of course! |
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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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