In honor of Labor Day and in order to tackle some of our website redesign to-dos (our magazine relaunch is in the works for this fall), we're taking a one week break from our regular publishing schedule. In the meantime, scroll down to see what's new from The Rumpus this week---including upcoming events in NYC and Asheville, an Indie Press Spotlight series, current calls for submissions, and more.
We wish everyone a restful holiday! -The Rumpus |
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Interviews & Reviews
Ashley M. Jones and Rebecca Gayle Howell interviewed by Mandana Chaffa about What Things Cost: An Anthology for the People
"...ultimately, the people are more powerful than any construct or any hallowed hall or even the pen that signs our existence out of law. This book reminded me that none of us are alone if we decide we are together."
Rebecca Foster reviews three recent cancer-themed collections
"All three poets contemplate the female body and the voice both literally and metaphorically, appealing to outside powers as they ponder how much a person can bear."
Elizabeth Gonzalez James interviews Hilary Leichter about her new novel Terrace Story
"The act of connection and the failure to connect . . . this is the terrain that fascinates me the most in fiction, because intimacy is a destination where one can never fully arrive."
Geoffrey D. Morrison's debut novel Falling Hour, reviewed by Emily McBride
"He walks, a man alone among a nonhuman supporting cast: the frame, a red-winged blackbird, the dark pond that the narrative skittishly circles, the scattered sand-grey buildings of a regional Ontario centre in decline, the absent buyer. "
Lily Raff McCaulou interviews Larrison Campbell about her podcast Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch
"...I think the very best thing we can do as journalists is not try to be objective but try to be transparent about our possible biases." |
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Originals & Columns
Funny Women: "Catalogue of This Season's Memoirs by Men" by Emma Smith-Stevens
“As much as my wife threatens to find another husband if I don’t ‘step up,’ I will never again enter the ravenous suction pipe of feminine horror.” |
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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 September 15th, to receive our October Poetry Book Club pick Another Last Call edited by Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis and join our subsciber-only conversation with editors Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis in conversation with Kristen Renee Miller, Editor in Chief and Executive Director at Sarabande Books, and Marisa Siegel, Senior Acquiring Editor for Trade at Northwestern University Press and Editor-at-Large for The Rumpus.
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 October's Poetry Book Club selection: In 1997, Sarabande published Last Call, a poetry anthology that became a formative text on the lived experiences of addiction. Now, more than twenty-five years later, editors Kaveh Akbar and Paige Lewis offer this companion volume for a new generation. Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance showcases work from poets like Joy Harjo, Afaa M. Weaver, Diane Seuss, Layli Long Soldier, Sharon Olds, Jericho Brown, Ada Limón, and Ocean Vuong, as well as many new and powerful voices.
“Why do I feel so at home among the poems and poets of Another Last Call: Poems on Addiction & Deliverance? There is nothing more human, haunted, humbling, and bottom line, than the desire that fuels addiction and recovery—and poetry. In reading this brilliant anthology, I feel less alone. I’ve found my people.” —Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for frank: sonnets
About October's featured indie press:Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary press founded in Louisville, Kentucky. Established in 1994 to champion poetry, fiction, and essay, they are committed to creating lasting editions that honor exceptional writing. With nearly three hundred titles in print, they have earned a dedicated readership and a national reputation as a publisher of diverse forms and innovative voices. Through their free arts programming like Sarabande Writing Labs, they are proud to invest in emerging writers and serve as an educational resource locally and nationally. |
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The Rumpus Presents: Small Press Sunday
The Rumpus presents our new monthly Instagram Live segment: Small Press Sunday hosted by our Assistant Interviews Editor, Janet Rodriguez! Small Press Sunday is an inside glimpse 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. In connection with our next Poetry Book Club pick (see above), our first small press is Sarabande Books!
Make sure to follow The Rumpus on Instagram and tune in on 9/10 at 3:30 PM PT/ 6:30 PM ET so you don't miss a thing. |
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IN PERSON | September 28, 7 PM McNally Jackson Seaport, NYC
The Rumpus presents Sapphic Storytelling: Queer eQuinox
Featuring authors Hannah Beresford, Jaquira Díaz, CJ Hauser, Lars Horn, T Kira Madden, and Kelley Van Dilla. Moderated by Rumpus Senior Features Editor, Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn. This is the latest in our reading and conversation series were we present writers we adore and use the term “sapphic” as a tongue-in-cheek term to refer to queerness that nods to the writerly and lacunae-filled history of queer people of all sexualities and genders. This event is a Bookends event presented in partnership with the Brooklyn Book Festival. |
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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 . . .
September 15: Quinn Carver Johnson is the author of The Perfect Bastard (Northwestern University Press), was the editor-in-chief of the Aonian literary magazine, and is host of the People's Poetry reading series in Tulsa, OK. (subscribe by September 14)
October 1: Ling Ma is the author of Severance (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) and Bliss Montage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), taught creative writing and English at Cornell University and at the University of Chicago, and has been awarded the Kirkus Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Story Prize, the Whiting Award, and an NEA Fellowship, among others. (subscribe by September 30) |
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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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