About Book Marks
Recent Reviews
Ariel Levy
Rave The Rumpus Every now and then, a book comes along that you will love forever. The Rules Do Not Apply is that book for me; since reading it, I’ve been touting it, teaching it, conversing with it ... Levy is brilliant at collaging the pieces of her life into a compelling story. Stories embed in other stories, because the character Levy, like the narrator Levy, is a storyteller ... Levy is so good at conveying the pendulum swings of fate and the privilege of good luck. And she’s got a hell of a story to tell. The voice, the character, the cinematography, if you will—the imagery and how it’s created—kept me gripped and entertained, choked up and chortling ... Virtually living through Levy’s story is devastating and exquisite. It takes us to the bone truths about expectations and love, about this particular generation, and about learning the rules the hard way.
Ed. by Manjula Martin
Mixed The Rumpus This first section of the book is called 'Early Days.' Kiese Laymon’s piece is written with a short story’s flow and interpersonal conflict (between a writer and an editor). I’m excited to read Alexander Chee’s description of his writing career because I admire the way he’s created a platform via his non-fiction. But in each piece, there seems to be little generalizable advice ... Caille Millner’s conversation with Richard Rodriguez offers the kinds of nuggets that keep a writer going ... with Leslie Jamison’s article, I hit the inspiration I’d been seeking. Like Lennon and Martin, Jamison challenges that glass wall, albeit with a different metaphor: 'What if we stopped thinking of money as the dirty secret of creative pursuit and instead recognized money as one of its constituent threads?' ... There is a lot of honesty in this middle section, a lot of details we don’t request in polite company ... The final section is called 'Someday.' This section is a bit of an amalgamation, as if the anthology did not quite know what 'someday' might look like, now that we’ve acknowledged that commerce is part of art.
Anuk Arudpragasam
Rave The Rumpus Arudpragasam writes with intimacy about the minutiae of this life...The prose, like poetry, is thick, concentrated. It takes two-and-a-half pages for Dinesh to clip his nails. Arudpragasam masterfully gives us the details of each experience ... dramatic and unpredictable changes, along with several 'ticking time bombs,' allow for the narrative to slow to a glacial pace without losing the attention of the reader ... It’s the kind of tale that, due to its apparent simplicity, might be called a fable. But it’s more textured than a fable. Small, simple events are freighted with detail and nuanced with meaning.
Kaui Hart Hemmings
Positive The Rumpus ...it’s a relief to be in the hands of a writer. Not a blogger, not a storyteller, but someone who can bring the reader into the moment-by-moment sensations of an experience, an interaction. Someone who homes in on conflict and character and brings them richly to the page via details, actions, gestures and descriptions that create in the reader a sense of living the story ... an absorbing book.