Magical Realism as the Savior of Memory: A Conversation with John Manuel Arias
Characters do stuff, and the reader is always going to ask "why," and as a writer I’m just as interested.
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Rumpus Articles
Child-rearing and Novel-writing: Kate Briggs’s The Long Form
THE LONG FORM reimagines both this relationship of mother-and-child and the histories and capacities of the novel. In the process, it disrupts these well-worn structures to create something delightfully new.
Rumpus Original Fiction: She Walks in Fields of Light
I don’t know if she’s dangerous, or crazy like they say. But in this deadening place, she’s the only live wire.
“Writing is An Insistence Against a World Insisting Otherwise”: An Interview with Jessica Cuello
Literature is a balm against loneliness. I feel close to these other writers, to the characters in their books, to these women in history.
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Carey Salerno
how exactly to ignite, to speak in sign, what the flashing draws down, damp, out, and what it / means to be a newborn body made of burnt-back embers, drifting over the sidewalk
October Spotlight: Letters in the Mail
Our next Letters in the Mail come from Ling Ma and Kelly Sather.
Negotiating Grief, Shame, Loneliness, and Love: A Conversation with Vauhini Vara
When Vauhini Vara’s This is Salvaged (W.W. Norton, 2023) arrived at my doorstep, I couldn’t wait to tear through the slim collection. Vara is a master storyteller, but more than…
Voices on Addiction: Whole Pools of It
This time, Mandy calls me. Her words are much quicker. There is the force of meaning behind them, but the slur is still perceivable at the edges.
The Novelist as Playwright: Albert Camus’s Caligula and Three Other Plays
Bloom’s translations of these plays remind us that Camus was not a philosopher who used theater to illustrate arguments like Sartre, but a tragic thinker for whom drama was a fundamental and necessary means of literalizing political and ethical metaphors.
Rumpus Original Fiction: The Dollmaker
Sakshi can lay me over her workbench, unstitch my skin, stuff me with fur, and then sew me. She can weave her magic into me. Make me not be myself anymore.
They’re Both and They’re Neither: A Conversation with Robert Lunday
My stepfather would always tell me, “Don’t think, act. Follow orders.” For me, I want to stop to consider the different angles.
What to Read When Your Spirit Needs a Refresh
A reading list from India Adams, author of FOX WOMAN GET OUT!