Nonbinary Thinking: Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids
We’re reminded that the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean were fish that evolved to walk on land. What are we if not constantly evolving?
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Rumpus Articles
The Trap of Domesticity: Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo
Between a stream-of-consciousness-inspired prose, image patterns, and consistent pivots of thought, Kanai establishes the most surprising thing about this novel: its ability to make the vertiginous hypnotic.
“A Mirror and a Window”: A Conversation with Jiordan Castle
I think the older we get, we change, but we still love what we love. We still have the same little shames and little happies and all these things that make us us from when we first started becoming whoever we were going to be.
What to Read When It’s Women in Translation Month
Women In Translation month has grown since inaugurated in 2013 into an organized global movement that includes translators from all backgrounds and genders.
Writing the Emotional Stakes of the Mundane: A Conversation with Alexandra Chang
As a writer, I really like working with constraints and getting to play with different structures, voices, moods, and characters. The simple fact that short stories are short gives me all of that.
The Mind of a Female Killer: My Men by Victoria Kielland
But while Cather’s eponymous Antonia rises above rumor and gossip through resilience, optimism, and an irresistibly endearing authenticity, forging happiness on her own terms, the story of Kielland’s Belle is alternatively uncomfortable and haunting.
The Poems Are a Part of How I’m Living: A Conversation with Edgar Kunz
The poems help me to see that, for the most part, I’m just doing my best, even when my best isn’t very good and I’m confused and flailing around.
Reveling in the In-Between: J. Estanislao Lopez’s We Borrowed Gentleness
This humor, fresh in its irreverence, is welcome alongside other poems that read darker and more cynical as they grapple with survival and death.
Quietly Magnificent: A Conversation with Christine Sneed
On DIRECT SUNLIGHT, the alchemy of titles and first lines, teaching, kangaroo humans, The National, and more.
A Ratio of Give and Take: Joyce Carol Oates’s Zero-Sum
Here, what is given, what is taken or refuted, what is owed engenders the myriad methods her characters use to shift responsibility or culpability away from themselves and onto others.