Jessa Crispin Can’t Do It Alone in Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto
Crispin’s writing strikes a tone that at times parallels neoconservative—even alt-right—pundits: commentary peppered with political injunctions, not criticism.
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Posts Tagged: book review
A Portrait of the Writing Process: Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood
Chew-Bose approaches the word essay less as a noun and more as a verb.
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Only Patricia Lockwood Could Get Away with Priestdaddy
As we know from her poetry, Lockwood’s humor can shape-shift into something else entirely, something quite moving.
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Saturday Rumpus Poetry: A Poem-Review of Milk Black Carbon and Whereas
And in the silence of the night the small sound of small feet making their way into words.
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Fantasy Is a Writer’s Most Powerful Weapon: Literature Class, Berkeley 1980
The reality of the horror cannot be put into words, cannot be realistically described; it can only enter through imagination.
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Living Outside the Narrative in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot
The Idiot dramatizes the alienation, and even heartbreak, of losing the narrative thread of your existence.
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The Myth of the Troubled Female in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace
Sometimes it’s necessary to shift one’s moral compass, and sometimes it’s necessary to destroy it.
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The Lucky Ones Are Those Who Do Not Disappear
Pachico offers is an anthropological view of small, beautifully evoked human experiences—an ethnography of survival, memory, and nostalgia.
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Celebrating Failures in Nell Stevens’s Bleaker House
Who has time for Writer Problems in the midst of all these PROBLEMS?
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Science Is Sexy in There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You
In the first story of this collection, a girl learns the shocking truth that the world is made of atoms, that “when you get right down to it, it’s all just studs and holes.”
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Ariel Levy’s Queer Generation
The playful sense of shifting identity applies to feminists, to writers, to anyone who chooses to believe we can reinvent ourselves.
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Biblical Rebels and Romantics in The First Love Story
Adam and Eve are the Bible’s most infamous couple: Bonnie and Clyde, year zero.
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The Strangely Plausible Abyss of American War
In Akkad’s dystopian scenario, the US faces a resurgent Mexico and a vast and newly powerful North African-Arabian empire.
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Lesley Nneka Arimah’s Characters Muscle Their Way through Girlhood
In our current political climate with its rampant animosity towards immigrants, Arimah offers a humanizing portrait of both the Nigerian citizen and first generation young female immigrant.
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Escaping Time with All Our Wrong Todays
Mastai takes the predictable stakes of time travel (erasing the future, changing the past) and heightens them.
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Daddy’s Girl Sees Daddy’s Scars in The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley
[Tinti] has cleverly illustrated the tender relationship between a father and his little girl, the respect a daughter has for her dad, and the lengths that both of them will travel to protect one another.
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Han Yujoo, Wild Child of the South Korean Literary Scene
The Impossible Fairy Tale presents a dark and fraught conception of childhood.
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J. M. Coetzee’s “Bread and Beans” Writing
I am fixated by this detail of the bread and beans because it strikes me that Coetzee’s prose might itself be described as “bread and beans” writing: short, declarative sentences, with a fairly simple vocabulary.
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Against Everything and the Arbitrary Nature of Success in Trump’s America
Each essay is animated by the conviction Greif articulates in his preface: that many of the reasons for our most common habits are wrong.
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Everyday Violence in Mariana Enríquez’s Things We Lost in the Fire
In Enríquez’s Argentina, superstitions and folk tales live side-by-side with stories of actual violence and horror.
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The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates by Jacob Bacharach
Leah Damski reviews The Doorposts of Your House and On Your Gates by Jacob Bacharach.
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An Arrangement of Skin by Anna Journey
Michalle Gould reviews An Arrangement of Skin by Anna Journey today in Rumpus Books.
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Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin
Chelsey Clammer reviews Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin today in Rumpus Books.
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Camanchaca by Diego Zúñiga
Graham Oliver reviews Camanchaca by Diego Zúñiga today in Rumpus Books.
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The Lost Daughter Collective by Lindsey Drager
Ilana Masad reviews The Lost Daughters Collective by Lindsey Drager today in Rumpus Books.
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Transit by Rachel Cusk
Ariel Djanikian reviews Transit by Rachel Cusk today in Rumpus Books.
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The Book of Endless Sleepovers by Henry Hoke
Allie Rowbottom reviews The Book of Endless Sleepovers by Henry Hoke today in Rumpus Books.
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4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster
Emily Burns Morgan reviews 4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster today in Rumpus Books.
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Abandon Me by Melissa Febos
Kea Krause reviews Abandon Me by Melissa Febos today in Rumpus Books.
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Culdesac by Robert Repino
Ian MacAllen reviews Culdesac by Robert Repino today in Rumpus Books.
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