Stuart Dybek discusses the forthcoming The Best Small Fictions 2016, the invisibility of anecdote, and why the art of transition is the art of the short story. ...more
Seeing is a critical part of normalizing, and though it seems like a rudimentary expectation, it’s important for American audiences to see Korean-Americans simply living their lives....more
Leigh Stein discusses her new memoir, Land of Enchantment, co-founding Out of the Binders, and why most of her projects begin as "an idea that someone else pushes back on." ...more
But I didn’t understand, then, how important memory is, for how do we know who we are without memory? How does anyone else know who we are, but for their memories of us?...more
I will always feel a little broken. Intellectually, I know her disease is “not my fault.” But I’m her mother. I will always partially feel the blame....more
Ann Packer discusses her most recent novel The Children's Crusade, artistic mothers, the writer and her “first principle,” and the fight to like your own characters. ...more
How does one scene impress itself on us, so that we remember it better than we should if we were in it? Or rest, just below the surface, present, but unnoticed?...more
What do we as writers tell each other about the intersections of trauma and desire? How do we encourage (or discourage) each other to reveal the power and tensions in those margins?...more
Ranbir Singh Sidhu discusses his new novel, Deep Singh Blue, growing up in rural California, and the privileged, problematic world of publishing. ...more
A bubble is a sphere of privilege, but it also provides the safety to mix up more soapy water and to blow new bubbles to protect what we hold dear....more
Yaa Gyasi discusses her debut novel Homegoing, growing up in Alabama, the multiplicity of black experiences, the legacy of slavery, and her writing process. ...more
Sunday 8/14: Celebrate the release of All We Can Hold (Sage Hill Press), an anthology of poems about motherhood. This evening reading at Magers and Quinn will include short performances by Tyler Davis, Kristin Laurel, Freya Manfred, Eva Olsgard, Margaret Rozga, Paula Schulz, Molly Sutton Kiefer, and Marianne Taylor. 7 p.m., free.
Tuesday 8/16: Roberta Brown reads from her new memoir, The Shoulding: A Story of Resilience and Hope, at Magers and Quinn. 7 p.m., free.
We have a new Monthly Book Report coming out on Monday morning! If you haven’t already subscribed, today is the day. You don’t want to miss our (free) roundup of all the stellar fiction, nonfiction, and poetry reviews that went up on the site this past month, plus a note from our Book Report editor. Sign up now!
You may have noticed some recent changes to The Rumpus masthead.
First, the sad news. Our terrific Essays Editor, Tracy Strauss, is stepping down to focus on other projects, including a new series over at the Ploughshares blog.
And we’re saying goodbye to our Interviews Editor, Melissa Batchelor Warnke, who is moving on to pursue her own writing—you can keep up with her awesome work here!
Lastly, after two years curating amazing essays, interviews, and book reviews, our Sunday Co-Editors Martha Bayne and Zoe Zolbrod will be stepping down at the end of September.
Luckily, we’ve found awesome editors to take over for these heavy-hitters. (more…)
It’s time to write a column, paint a picture, compose a song, draft an outline: whatever. Creative expression doesn’t happen by itself, we have to work at it. You know where this is going, don’t you? (more…)
Marvin Gaye’s influence on music is undeniably significant and pervasive. Given that, how does one measure the difference between emulation and rip-off? In the case of Robin Thicke and Pharrell’s “Blurred Lines,” the use of Gaye’s music was so undeniable and complete that even a casual listener could identify the misuse. But if the alleged infringement takes the form of a borrowed chord progression or rhythm, subsumed under layers of dominating pop vocals, is that infringement or influence? (more…)
Rion Amilcar Scott’s debut collection Insurrections—our July Rumpus Book Club pick—comes out from University Press of Kentucky on Tuesday and is a timely and vital look into the daily struggles of individuals in the mostly black community of Cross River, Maryland, a fictional town that was founded by slaves in 1807 after a successful revolt. (Read more about the origins of Cross River in Scott’s interview at Specter Magazine.) One of the standout stories from the collection is “A Friendly Game,” which follows four teen boys as hypermasculinity threatens to tear them apart, and the crackhead with a heartbreaking past who becomes the target of their humiliation-fueled rage. Those in the Rumpus Book Club have already had the pleasure of reading the story in their advance copies of Insurrections, but if you who haven’t joined yet (do it here!) can read this troubling and necessary story at Literary Orphans.
The characters in “A Friendly Game” could be pigeonholed into stereotypical roles—the bully, the lackey, the good guy—and the reader does get the impression that these teenage boys are indeed trying to conform to a certain way of being, but Scott skillfully resists and undermines these tropes even as he shows his characters trying so hard to fit in to them. (more…)
In A.O. Scott’s eyes, summer blockbusters and workplace sitcoms aren’t that different these days:
Part of what makes work tolerable is the idea that it is heroic, the fantasy that repetitive and meaningless tasks are charged with risk and significance. Pecking away at our keyboards, we’re cowboys, warriors, superheroes. But meanwhile, superheroics look like every other job.
When the physicality of my gender—that “place” that could be home—feels out of reach, tattoos are my way to be present in my body, and to control what happens to it. When I get a tattoo, I can decide how much of the pain I want to bear by either staring directly at the artist’s needle as they work, or by looking away. I decide on the design, and I create the story behind that design, too, and how it relates to me.
Friday 8/12: Join Rebellious Magazine founder Karen Hawkins and contributors Rachel Berg Scherer, Lisa Farver, Molly Harris, and Princess McDowell for a rousing night of readings and rebellions, followed by cocktails. Women & Children First, 7:30 p.m., free.
Saturday 8/13: Stop by City Lit Books for the worldwide release of VORACIOUS Vol. 1: Diners, Dinosaurs & Dives, the critically acclaimed graphic novel by Chicagoland creators Markisan Naso and Jason Muhr. 5 p.m., free.
Sunday 8/14: As always, the Uptown Poetry slam is going down at The Green Mill. Open mic starts at 7 p.m. followed by the slam itself. $7, 21+.
In his monthly series “The Lives of Others” over at the Paris Review, Edward White introduces us to globe-trotting Turkish writer, Evliya Çelebi, and the esoteric but lively book of travel stories he penned almost four centuries ago:
Evliya so adored the bustling energy of Istanbul that he dedicated the first volume of the Seyahatname to it. In his telling, it was a place of learning, culture, and endless sensory stimulation, where acrobats from Arabia, Persia, Yemen, and India performed in the streets, and where ‘thousands of old and young lovers’ exposed their ‘rosy pink bodies, like peeled almonds’ to the summer sun, swimming and canoodling in the open.
Less than two percent of science fiction stories published in 2015 were by black writers. And a recent study found that black speculative fiction writers face “universal” racism—more damning evidence demonstrating the institutionalized racism in book publishing, and the importance of introducing more diversity at every level of the process.
At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Professor Ted Underwood talks about why Digital Humanities, the new discipline he’s often associated with, doesn’t exist:
It’s true that [Digital Humanities] can be aligned with managerial thinking—administrators like it. It can also be hypnotized by shiny pictures and prone to moralistic groupthink on social media. Everything that annoys us about our own time can be found in DH. But what does that tell us? It tells us that it’s not a very coherent concept really.
Chris Kraus’s experimental, cult classic I Love Dick has been adapted for TV by Jill Soloway, and it’s time to revisit and scrutinize Kraus’s use of the slur “kike,” and indeed Kraus’s sense of her own Jewishness. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Rebecca Sonkin places Kraus in the Jewish literary tradition of her “macho, horny, predecessors,” and asks, “Could it be that Kraus is the female Jewish schlemiel, an awkward and unlucky person—insecure, emotionally hungry, self-obsessed—for whom things never turn out right?”