Saying What Shouldn’t Be Said: A Conversation with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, why writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world, and finding truths in fiction.
...more
Posts Tagged: Middlemarch
Spotlight: A Poetry Comics Discussion
Amy Fusselman gathers four writer-artists working in the poetry comics genre to discuss the emerging form.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Benjamin Parzybok
Author Benjamin Parzybok talks about his new novel, Sherwood Nation, climate fiction, the difference between post-collapse and post-apocalyptic, and how novels can predict the future if they try hard enough (and get lucky).
...moreMy Life In Books Besides Middlemarch
Looking back on her reading life in her late teens, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead discusses the “flawed and pernicious division” between books read for pleasure and books read “because we have to,” because they’re part of the established literary canon.
...moreMy Life in Middlemarch by Rebecca Mead
I was walking around Washington, D.C., my hometown and the city where I lived for 34 years, while reading Rebecca Mead’s My Life in Middlemarch. I imagined all the selves I had been while walking on a few blocks full of my own, my family’s and my country’s history. There were the National Archives, where […]
...moreBefore the “Dumb Blonde” Joke
Literary blondes have always held a totemic power….Sex, politics, and power: fictional blondes had it all. For the Toast, Stassa Edwards looks back at centuries of literature and culture—Petrarch’s Laura, Middlemarch‘s Rosamond Vincy, Taylor Swift—to parse the semiotics of blondness. From redemptive purity to sexual danger, we’ve been reading all kinds of meaning into blond hair […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Lauren Groff
Anyone who knows Lauren Groff’s fiction would not be surprised to find that as a child in upstate New York her favorite stories were Brothers Grimm fairy tales, and by her teens she was determined to be a writer. After completing her MFA at University of Wisconsin-Madison, she worked odd jobs that allowed her hours […]
...moreMiddlemarch Panorama
Rumpus contributor extraordinaire Jason Novak shares an ambitious illustration of George Eliot’s Middlemarch over at the Paris Review Daily.
...moreFucking and Writing: The Rumpus Conversation with Jami Attenberg
“Perhaps we should talk about fucking. Fucking and writing, fucking and talking, fucking and thinking, fucking and whatever else it is that fucking goes with…”
...more