The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Thomas Farber
“As a writer, to describe even perils can be a form of hope.”
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Posts by: Leland Cheuk
The Loss of All Lost Things by Amina Gautier
Leland Cheuk reviews The Loss of All Lost Things today in Rumpus Books.
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Submission by Michel Houellebecq
Leland Cheuk reviews Submission by Michel Houellebecq today in Rumpus Books.
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Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson
Leland Cheuk reviews Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson today in Rumpus Books.
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Alphabet and Paradise and Elsewhere by Kathy Page
Leland Cheuk reviews Alphabet and Paradise and Elsewhere by Kathy Page today in Rumpus Books.
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The Last Magazine by Michael Hastings
Leland Cheuk reviews THE LAST MAGAZINE by Michael Hastings today in The Rumpus Books.
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The Elixir of Immortality by Gabi Gleichmann
Leland Cheuk reviews Gabi Gleichmann’s THE ELIXIR OF IMMORTALITY today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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At Night We Walk In Circles by Daniel Alarcón
Leland Cheuk reviews Daniel Alarcón’s AT NIGHT WE WALK IN CIRCLES today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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Big Brother by Lionel Shriver
Few novelists go on the attack like Lionel Shriver. Whether the topic is teenaged killers or domestic terrorism or the U.S. health care system, Shriver makes every carefully chosen word of every sentence pack a predatory bite. In her new work, Big Brother, Shriver takes on obesity and our culture’s obsession with it.
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The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
The first 100 pages of Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings are just that: interesting, but short of compelling. In the late sixties, six teenagers meet at an arts camp named Spirit-In-The-Woods and coin themselves The Interestings, because in the insular world of a summer camp, everyone seems talented and interesting. We get to watch their friendships […]
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“Percival Everett By Virgil Russell,” by Percival Everett
The prolific Percival Everett tackles the timeless psychic tug-of-war between fathers and sons with zigzagging, psychedelic verve in his twentieth novel Percival Everett by Virgil Russell. Everett has mastered his playful, self-referential style, and seems more intent than ever to alternately puzzle and move the reader, often in the span of a single sentence.
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“Pure,” by Andrew Miller
The central question of Andrew Miller’s novel Pure, set in Louis XVI’s pre-revolutionary France, mirrors that of the recent American presidential election—“yes on progress, but at what cost?”
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“Hush Hush,” by Steven Barthelme
Steven Barthelme’s new collection of short stories Hush Hush plays like the best of saddest love songs. These are elegiac, yet hopeful stories about characters who bumble through existence, struggle to articulate their feelings, and careen towards moments that can’t be unlived and precipices where possibility, crushing loss, and logic-less misdeeds intersect.
...moreThe Vanishers
Heidi Julavits’ latest novel The Vanishers is provocative and full of hefty, even academic ideas—at its best, a nouveau feminist manifesto.
...moreLost in Space
Both rhetorically playful and plot driven, Tom McCarthy’s first novel, Men in Space, now out in the U.S., floats in between his other novels Remainder and C.
...moreThe Surreal Nature of Real Life
Edited and illustrated by Arthur Jones, Post-It Note Diaries collects 20 mundane but evocative tales by storytellers ranging from Chuck Klosterman to Andrew Bird.
...moreA Tall Tale Too True
Set in the 1840s Midwest, Kris Saknussemm’s second novel, Enigmatic Pilot, delivers unexpected characters in a surreal interpretation of American history.
...moreI am a Japanese Writer
With wit and insight, Dany Laferriere, the Haitian-Canadian novelist, explores national identity and cultural authenticity in his latest book, I Am a Japanese Writer.
...moreSerious Men
Manu Joseph’s satirizes contemporary India, “pounding away at the caste system like a pitcher repeatedly throwing his best fastball.”
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