Wilberforce by H.S. Cross and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
Heather Partington analyzes two very different books published in 2015 that examine the effects of grief and of all-boys British boarding schools.
...more
Posts by: Heather Partington
Rus Like Everyone Else by Bette Adriaanse
Heather Scott Partington reviews Bette Adriaanse’s debut novel Rus Like Everyone Else.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Michael Seidlinger
The Publisher-in-Chief of Civil Coping Mechanisms and Book Reviews Editor for Electric Literature talks about his newest novel, The Strangest.
...more
My Life as a Mermaid by Jen Grow
Heather Partington reviews Jen Grow’s new collection My Life as a Mermaid.
...more
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed edited by Meghan Daum
Daum’s collection is at its best when it’s being the most transparent and unapologetic.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Book Review: From Here by Jen Michalski
Many authors’ stories blend together across a collection; they struggle to convey a unique voice in each piece. Not so with Jen Michalski’s From Here. Though her characters share common experiences—dashed hopes, disappointments, misunderstanding by loved ones—the voice in each story of From Here is fresh and specific. Whether she is writing of a voyeuristic […]
...moreThe Sunday Rumpus Review: The Man Who Walked Away by Maud Casey
In her new novel, The Man Who Walked Away, Maud Casey examines the history of psychology: both its inception and the powerful draw for doctors trying to uncover the causes of man’s mental illness during the early days of the field. Inspired by the real story of a late 19th Century man, Albert Dadas, afflicted […]
...moreThe Sunday Rumpus Review: A Different Bed Every Time by Jac Jemc
The prose of some books keeps you at arm’s length. Resists the idea of transparency or security. Dares you to look deeper to find meaning. The sentences in Jac Jemc’s collection, A Different Bed Every Time, require untangling. Sentences like, “Your body flood us and we rocks and fogs, delivering. The climate outside our body […]
...moreThe Sunday Rumpus Reviews: Fridays at Enrico’s by Don Carpenter and Inside Madeleine by Paula Bomer
Fridays at Enrico’s (Counterpoint) Don’t write about writing. That gets said a lot. But like any absolute about what not to do, it’s only true until someone does it well. Such is the case with Don Carpenter’s Fridays at Enrico’s, his final novel, finished by Jonathan Lethem after Carpenter’s death. The novel follows a small […]
...moreBeside Myself by Ashley Farmer
There are many reasons that an author would want to put a book–an actual physical object–into a reader’s hands, rather than just communicating data. Some books rebuff the notion that fiction is the same when it’s replicated digitally, downloaded, or speed-read. As I write this, the internet is abuzz over the new Spritz app, which […]
...moreThe Sunday Rumpus Review: Women in Bed by Jessica Keener
What sends us to our beds? Desire, sure. Sex. But also sickness. Sleep. Loneliness and healing. Jessica Keener’s Women in Bed is a collection of nine stories about women at all stages of life and wanting.
...moreThe Sunday Rumpus Review: Goodnight Nobody by Ethel Rohan
Ethel Rohan’s stories are snapshots. Stark vignettes. We see her characters in the middle of conflict, just at the moment of their potential undoing. In Rohan’s collection, Goodnight Nobody, she assembles thirty short stories that show each character walking a line. Rohan understands light and shade, the hard edges between things, and her short tales […]
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Book Review: If I’d Known You Were Coming by Kate Milliken
What we do to each other in moments breeds a kind of emotional genealogy that can’t be undone. The characters in Kate Milliken’s debut collection, If I’d Known You Were Coming, are bound to the emotional aftermath of their family choices. Her stories are an elegant exploration of each character’s attempts to reconcile his or […]
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Review: Something Wrong with Her by Cris Mazza
Mazza wants to raise the issue prominently, but not to resolve it. In a way, she seeks to create for us the discomfort, the lack of resolution she feels in her own life.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Book Review: The Color Master by Aimee Bender
With her return to the short story form, renowned surrealist writer Aimee Bender “takes the fairytale, the fable, the myth, and renders them for a modern audience.”
...more