The Rumpus Interview with Ben Greenman
Humor and experimental fiction—charting the meaning of charts, playing with ideas like a slippage between the gears of perception and reality—have been Ben Greenman’s stock in trade.
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Posts by: Sean Carman
The Rumpus Interview with David Shields
Essayist and lauded thinker David Shields talks about his new book, whether it’s necessary to draw sharp distinctions between literary forms, and his celebration of literature that collapses the distance between the artist’s life and work.
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The Rumpus Interview with Craig Nova
Powerhouse novelist Craig Nova discusses his newest work, the terrors of the universe, the solaces of fiction, and his influences, from Albert Camus to Alice Munro.
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Inside by Alix Ohlin
The Rumpus Interview with Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman’s book The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them combines memoir, literary criticism, and non-fiction reporting
Sean Carman: The Last Book I Loved, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter
Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa’s 1977 novel, begins with an epigraph–a quote from Salvador Elizondo’s The Graphographer–about the watery line between reality and its representation in language.
“I write,” it begins. “I write that I am writing.
...moreMissing Tiles in the American Mosaic: The Rumpus Interview with Alia Malek
In late October 2000, Alia Malek, the American daughter of Syrian immigrant parents, started work as a civil rights lawyer in the U.S. Justice Department. She then watched the newly-elected Bush Administration re-direct
Sean Carman: The Last Book I Loved, Stories I Stole
Wendell Steavenson’s memoir of her time as a freelance foreign correspondent in Tblisi, Georgia, begins in her former Time Magazine office, where she and her friend Nina spin escape fantasies under the world map tacked above their desks. Nina has stuck her pin in Pamplona.
The Rest of the Story: The Rumpus Interview with Chris Tarry
I met Chris Tarry on the Thursday of AWP, on the mobbed second floor of a popular blues bar in Adams Morgan, after a friend and I had been gonged out of a literary talent show by Pam Houston.
Harlem Blues
Between 1915 and 1970, six million African-Americans left the oppression of the Jim Crow South to find freedom in California and the northern states. Most traveled by rail, with those in the Southeast taking the Seaboard Air Line up the East Coast to Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, and New York.
Lounge Music
This is a book meant to bring poetry to the masses, in other words, and so [Editor A. J.] Rathbun has thrown in something for every taste, if only to ensure that every reader will find something to love.
...moreSean Carman: The Last Book I Loved, The Master and Margarita
A poet named Homeless and his friend Berlioz, the editor of a literary magazine, sit on a park bench at the Patriarch Ponds in Moscow, drinking apricot soda and discussing a poem Homeless has written about Jesus.
Sean Carman: The Last Book I Loved, The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
The great thing about Russian literature is how strange it is.
The characters in Dostoevsky are always breaking out in histrionics. They bustle about, shake their fists, and call each other scoundrels. They “fly” to wherever they are going and “fly at” each other when they get there.
...morePaperback Writer: The Rumpus Interview With Michael Greenberg
The problem is that there is no clear path to literary success, no way to know what you’re supposed to do.
