“The trick to getting through your twenties intact, it seemed to me, was looking ahead to the narrative I could impose on that decade later in life.” The last book The Rumpus loved? Slouching Towards Bethlehem.
The Second Coming
To Locate One’s Place in the World
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Edan Lepucki Sells California
Congratulations to Millions staffer Edan Lepucki, who sold her debut novel California to Little, Brown at auction this week. The novel, which Edan refers to as “Novel #2” in her article “What Happens When a Book Doesn’t Sell,” will follow a young married couple grappling with a post-apocalyptic world. Consider us extra relieved given Edan’s proclamation in that article: “And this new book, it will be published. If it doesn’t, well, I’ll just die.”
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“From Annihilation to Acceptance”
Recommended reading: Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy, writes for The Atlantic about the “surreal journey” of publishing three novels in one year. Pair with VanderMeer’s Millions interview with Richard House.
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“Thus the unfacts, did we possess them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude…”
Michael Chabon takes on Finnegans Wake in The New York Review of Books. This is mandatory reading, class.
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Kurt Vonnegut’s Doodles
When Kurt Vonnegut wasn’t writing, he was drawing. “The making of pictures is to writing what laughing gas is to the Asian influenza,” he said. The New Yorker has a slideshow of 10 of his cubist sketches. You can find more of his doodles in the new book Kurt Vonnegut Drawings.
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“A signature strike leveled the florist’s”
“I’ve always referred to it as a troubled project in the sense that I’m trying to tell stories about people who not are here in a way to tell their own stories. I’m trying to speak about an environment I knew well, but I’m aware that I’m dealing with very dark material. I’m pointing out the irony of what we would wish for ourselves and what actually ends up happening.” Teju Cole on tweeting American drone strikes.
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Crystal Methods
Curtis Sittenfeld did some interesting research for her latest novel, Sisterland. “I went to this New Age bookstore in a distant suburb of St. Louis. I basically went there and was like, ‘I’m doing research,’ and then I un-ironically bought some crystals,” she told The Rumpus.
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