Interviews & Reviews
Edgar Kunz interviewed by Gabriella Souza about his poetry collection Fixer.
"...they carried themselves as if being a sensitive, kind, purposeful person was the most natural thing in the world, like it would be ridiculous to live any other way."
Anushka Joshi reviews Victoria Kielland's My Men.
"The novel’s prose is characterized by a highly saturated, ripe sensuality that remains palpable and powerful in the translation by Damion Searls."
Alexandra Chang interviewed by Greg Mania about her recently released short story collection, Tomb Sweeping.
"A lot of the stories surprise me, because I don't tend to have a plan when writing. I like to see where a character or line or general idea takes me as I'm writing—that's a lot of the joy of writing for me." |
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Originals & Columns
Essay: "When We Melt" by G. Ravyn Stanfield:
"Theatre is born of ritual; it’s about joining the cosmos on a visceral level. In ritual, your throat gives birth to stars; your muscles become galactic clouds."
From the Archives: "The Pet Store" by Siobhan May:
"The boy is looking for something specific. I can tell. It shows on his face when he scans the shelves and doesn’t find it."
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| What To Read When: It's Women in Translation Month Women In Translation month has grown since inaugurated in 2013 into an organized global movement that includes translators from all backgrounds and genders. To celebrate, here are nine recommendations spanning the globe and a variety of styles, themes, and concerns—from Mexico to Thailand; about motherhood, daughterhood, tradition vs modernity, life after transitioning; stories that span fabulist tales to true crime narratives.
— Rumpus Editors |
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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 August 15th, to receive our September Poetry Book Club pick The Kingdom of Surfaces by Sally Wen Mao and join our subsciber-only conversation with the author, her editor, Jeff Shotts at Graywolf Press, and Rumpus Poetry Editor, Brian Spears.
As a subscriber, we'll send you a copy of this book the first week of September 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 September's Poetry Book Club selection: In The Kingdom of Surfaces, award-winning poet Sally Wen Mao examines art and history—especially the provenance of objects such as porcelain, silk, and pearls—to frame an important conversation on beauty, empire, commodification, and violence. In lyric poems and wide-ranging sequences, Mao interrogates gendered expressions such as the contemporary “leftover women,” which denotes unmarried women, and the historical “castle-toppler,” a term used to describe a concubine whose beauty ruins an emperor and his empire. These poems also explore the permeability of object and subject through the history of Chinese women in America, labor practices around the silk loom, and the ongoing violence against Asian people during the COVID-19 pandemic.
At its heart, The Kingdom of Surfaces imagines the poet wandering into a Western fantasy, which covets, imitates, and appropriates Chinese aesthetics via Chinamania and the nineteenth-century Aesthetic movement, while perpetuating state violence upon actual lives. The title poem is a speculative recasting of “Through the Looking-Glass,” set in a surreal topsy-turvy version of the China-themed 2015 Metropolitan Museum of Art Gala. The Kingdom of Surfaces is a brilliantly conceived call for those who recognize the horrors of American exceptionalism to topple the empire that values capital over lives and power over liberation.
About September's featured indie press:Graywolf Press is a leading nonprofit publisher committed to the discovery and energetic publication of twenty-first century American and international literature. In recent years, Graywolf books have won numerous national and international awards—including the Booker and Booker International Prizes, the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Founded in 1974, the press is located in Minneapolis, Minnesota. |
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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 . . .
August 15: Sequoia Nagamatsu author of How High We Go in the Dark, a national bestseller and New York Times Editors' Choice, as well as the story collection, Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone (subscribe by August 14)
September 1: Mario Chard is the author of Land of Fire (Tupelo Press, 2018), winner of the Dorset Prize and the Georgia Author of the Year Award in Poetry. (subscribe by August 31) |
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| Deadline extended! ENOUGH a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for work by women and non-binary people who engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence is now open for submissions until August 15th.
Open Aug. 1 to Oct. 31 for original Comics.
Opening soon for original Fiction (reading period Aug. 15 to Sept. 15).
Parallel Practice, a new monthly column at The Rumpus, is edited by our very own Anna Held. 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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