Writer Fiona Maazel talks about her love for the “sad, lonely, self-loathing guy,” the appeal of cults, setting her latest novel in the wildly divergent worlds of North Korea and Cincinnati, and her current fascination with neuroprosthetics.
...moreIn a downright insane profile piece for GQ, Rumpus interviewee Adam Johnson talks to Kenji Fujimoto, the sushi chef and longtime friend of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Il.
The article is just as wild and disturbing as Johnson’s The Orphan Master’s Son (which just won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize), but it’s nonfiction.
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Social workers in South Korea frequently refer to North Korean defectors as da-moonhwa, a broad label that means “many cultures.”
...moreAt The Morning News, check out head Rumpus illustrator Jason Novak and Mike Duncan’s “She Nukes Me, She Nukes Me Not” ironically comical visual guide to the history of the US relationship with North Korea.
It’s definitely worth the read, if only for Novak’s amazing interpretation of North Korea’s uranium enrichment program.
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When I saw Stephen Elliott call The Orphan Master’s Son “the best novel I’ve read in forever,” in one of his Daily Rumpus emails I knew I had to interview Adam Johnson for the Rumpus.
In The Orphan Master’s Son, Adam Johnson has not only visited a nation curtained from the rest of the world, but has recreated it with compassion and humanity. The result is a relentless examination of what it means to be human in an inhumane world.
North Korean women risk their lives to escape across the border to China, where they often face lives of indentured servitude and the ever-present fear of being outed by the husbands they marry or communities they join and sent back to North Korea.
