metafiction
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Sentences
” . . . I’m pretending to be a student for the sake of a thought experiment I’m trying to disguise as a story so it has a better chance of getting read. Also, I look young.”
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Down the Rabbit Hole: Eugene Lim’s Search History
Lim has written before about experimental fiction and the need to slough off such conventions of narrative as plot.
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An Elaborately Constructed Artifice: Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall
Slipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment.
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On Saviors and Superheroes: A Conversation with Adam Nemett
Adam Nemett discusses his debut novel, WE CAN SAVE US ALL.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #93: Barbara Browning
When I requested an interview from Barbara Browning to talk about her new novel, The Gift, she agreed and asked if I had a favorite song she could cover for me on the ukulele. Browning possesses many gifts—she is an…
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The Rumpus Interview with Kristopher Jansma
Kristopher Jansma discusses his second novel, Why We Came to the City, facing adulthood in his thirties, and working through grief and loss in writing.
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The Greatest Experimentalist You’ve Never Heard Of
She felt that this approach illuminated a fundamental truth about language: The very act of using language, she once told an interviewer, involves a ‘castration. The moment we utter a sentence, we’re leaving out a lot.’ A “nanopress” has begun…
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Learning to Love
Maybe the best reading leads us to struggle with ourselves. Jennifer Audette writes about the messiness of learning to love the metafiction of Ben Lerner for the Fiction Writer’s Review: But then again, why do I need the narrator to…
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Reading Between the Lines
Here is what I mean by meta-fiction: all these books, stories, and bodies of work contain made-up books and bodies of work. Some are based on real books. Some are making fun of real books, a little bit, gently. Some…
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The Rumpus Interview with Sean Michaels
The Rumpus talks to Sean Michaels about his new book, Us Conductors, challenging a reader’s empathy, and a true, strange musical instrument: the theremin.
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The Private Lives of Trees
The second novella by Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, one of the “Bogotá 39” influential Latin American writers, uses metafiction to tell a delicate, emotionally complex story.
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From Old Notebooks
“As the writer wrestles with his book and his family, we reexamine our thoughts about the writer. It’s a performance in which writer and reader have equal billing.”