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The Blurb #14: The Land of Underwater Birds
What makes a good title? What makes a bad one?And how do you know when you’ve found the right one?These questions come up occasionally in the creative writing classes I teach, and I’m sorry to say I...
View ArticleNo One Belongs Here More Than My Therapist’s Wife
It’s funny, I love Miranda July’s stories but Gordon Haber at Bookslut is insightful about her varied titles:“We Are Vaguely Included seems to show the influence of Miranda July, who has demonstrated...
View ArticleAmerican Book Cover in Paris (and Lots of Other Foreign Places)
SF Gate has a neato slideshow comparing American book covers to their foreign editions.Sometimes they change barely at all (Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones), while sometimes they’re...
View ArticleWriting, Titling, Tricoloning
Greek for “of equal number of clauses,” isocolon is a rhetorical device that produces a sense of order by balancing parallel elements that are similar in structure and length within a sentence. An...
View ArticleHow to Title Your Next Novel
What patterns, dreams, and desires lie hidden within the ostensible hook of a novel’s title?Dustin Illingworth, for Lit Hub, explores the keys to a successful book title after considering, among...
View ArticleWhat’s in a Name?
If there are indeed an infinite number of universes, it’s nice to think there might be one where all of the books we have come to know bear their original, author-intended titles. For the Paris Review,...
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Jonterri Gadson
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Jonterri Gadson about her new collection Blues Triumphant, her love of editing, and the intersection of poetry and comedy writing.This is an edited transcript of...
View ArticleWhat Do You Call It?
Book titles are an essential component of the texts they gesture at. They’re also advertising. At Catapult, Hannah Gersen recounts the naming process for her novel Home Field:A short story title can be...
View ArticleThe Working Titles of Classic Lit
While the great classics studied in classrooms everywhere tend to have very memorable titles, those classics could have received slightly different treatment had their working titles been used instead....
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The Rumpus Interview with Tobias Carroll
I first met Tobias Carroll years ago at BookThugNation in Williamsburg. A friend and I were traveling to work at the Bronx Museum Book Fair, and Toby helped us arrange a reading at BookThug with him...
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Sarah Blake
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Sarah Blake about her new collection Let’s Not Live on Earth, questions in poems, monsters, and the challenge of writing a dystopia. This is an edited transcript...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #217: Sue William Silverman
In her fourth memoir, How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences, Sue William Silverman proves, once again, that stories both live inside us until we are ready to process them onto parchment and...
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