Become a Rumpus Member
Join NOW!This year’s children’s literature has some exceptional bonafides. Over the next few months, a number of acclaimed novelists, including Jane Smiley and Elena Ferrante, will be publishing children’s books. Whether a five-year-old can distinguish between literary and genre fiction, only time will tell.
...moreCan women really have it all? Like, all of it? But how could they possibly have multiple things at the same time? How can they even think human thoughts after they’ve subsumed their corporeal selves into an all-encompassing prison of motherhood? For Lit Hub, miraculous hybrid mother/writer Diana Abu-Jaber explains that art and babies aren’t […]
...moreWe’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of understanding the person behind the work. For Lit Hub, Heller McAlpin examines a long tradition of writing about writers: There’s a special frisson of pleasure in reading about writers’ early struggles when you know what the future holds for them—which in the case of most of these […]
...moreBut dip into nearly any of Stevens’s poems, to the last, and be braced by a voice like none other, in its knitted playfulness and in its majesty. For most of his life, Wallace Stevens worked a day job as an insurance executive, and yet he still found time to become one of the greatest […]
...moreClichés are tempting because they do the work of communicating for us. In a manifesto against workshop jargon, Helen Betya Rubinstein warns us of the dangers of sticking to old models: …because you’d have to remember all the way back to the first time you heard this cliché against clichés to actually see, once again, […]
...moreThis past weekend, thousands of people convened to celebrate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The Elizabethan bard’s formal innovations are widely revered as some of the most influential literary developments in history, so much so that we almost overlook what he was even writing about: …for Shakespeare, life itself is a type of lie.
...moreThe Internet may have irreversibly altered the forms activism takes, but there is still room for change. Christopher Soto reflects on activist frameworks used in 2015 and offers their strategies for working toward a more inclusive poetry community in the future: I believe in critical conversations with my community, I believe in doing rehabilitative work […]
...moreA connection so fundamentally optional doesn’t provide the same ambivalence and tension you get with alcoholic parents, narcissistic spouses, or resentful bosses. If your friend abuses you or your trust, you can just walk away. Slate’s Laura Miller explains why nobody writes memoirs about their friends, and then looks at two recent books that take […]
...moreAfter all they’ve done for literature, it’s about time someone wrote an ode to bookstore cats: It began as a working relationship, but became something more than that, something deeper.
...moreInspiration is a fickle mistress—sometimes the Muse doesn’t show up for years. Louis Begley may have gotten a late start, but after beginning his first novel at age fifty-six, he hasn’t stopped writing. The author reflects on his career for The New Republic: Without having set out to do so, I seem to have grown […]
...moreMemoirs get a bad rap, for reasons both legitimate and superficial. With a work of unintentional autobiography under his belt, Lucas Mann grapples with the stigma of the reflexive: To put it bluntly, memoir is the only literary form still defined by its shittiest iterations.
...moreTo honor the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Folger Shakespeare Library is sending the First Folio around the country. Looks like the book tour really is dead.
...moreLock the gates, board the doors, AWP is nigh. Vincent Scarpa offers his tips for surviving the week, including this gem: …arrive alive if you can.
...moreIf a link falls on the Internet and no one is online to click it, does it really make a connection? Michael Seidlinger takes on the Sisyphean task of building identity in cyberspace: We have all become Sisyphus, pushing our rocks up a hill littered with hyperlinks and tweets, perpetually, futilely, refreshing the page of […]
...moreAt this stoplight, you might begin to think, “I’ve been here before, there is nothing new to notice.” But it seems to me that we actually live here, and we often fail to notice what is in our own yard. For Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon talks about what we talk about when we talk about books.
...moreDie publishing industry; zines forever! Liska Jakobs reports live from last weekend’s LA Zine Fest, where DIY publishing continues to flourish even as the contradictions of modern capitalism reveal themselves: You don’t need an MFA to make a zine. You sure as hell don’t need NYC either.
...moreSince its publication twenty years ago, Frances Mayes’s memoir Under the Tuscan Sun has transformed its namesake Italian setting into a sort of synonym for a wealthy lifestyle. Travel writer Jason Wilson revisited the work only to discover exactly the charms it so frustratingly popularized: However I feel about Mayes and her privilege, and the marketing […]
...moreI had considered envying men before—I pretend to envy things like their higher incidence of ungrounded confidence and monomania, but I don’t really envy those things, and I’m not sure I even believe in them… In an excerpt published in the New Yorker from her forthcoming book, Rivka Galchen writes about her first experience of real […]
...moreDutifully we come out for the readings, we put on our thinking faces, we offer our commentary, but behind our pensive stares there remains that clandestine part of us that’s honestly just trying not to fall asleep. Lucky for us, this literary cabaret series promises to inject a little razzle-dazzle into our stale evenings.
...moreLondon’s Feminist Library is at risk of being evicted in April due to a rent hike to more than double its former fee. Broadly spoke to some of the women fighting to save their space: “Without the Feminist Library, my work would not exist.”
...moreBy this point, the relationship between books and television is complicated enough to merit its own Netflix series. Or its own book. Or maybe both: Like lovers who share an apartment, they’ve started speaking and looking alike.
...moreHowever unbelievable they seem, Nathan Fielder’s doomed interactions with small business owners on Nathan For You are all too painfully real. But in an economic landscape as cockamamy as today’s, they might as well be the work of fantasy: Conditions are desperate enough, both Nathan and Tales suggest, to make money from poop.
...moreThe publication of Go Set a Watchman may have cast Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird in a new light, but the high school classic and its author will forever occupy an essential spot in the American literary canon. Michiko Kakutani remembers Lee’s work for the Times: Ms. Lee’s two novels both concern the loss […]
...moreInfinite Jest recently turned twenty, a birthday so momentous it merited a new edition of the tome for college students to display on their bedside tables. In light of the renewed discussion about David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus, D.T. Max reminds disciples that he also wrote some other stuff: Alongside his first collection, “Girl with […]
...moreRemind yourself that you are in control. The New Yorker is there for you and not the other way around. It is your feelings that matter in this relationship. Sure, we all subscribe. But who really has time to read all those New Yorkers?
...moreSometimes it feels like New York isn’t full of interesting people so much as people who are more interesting than you. For BuzzFeed Books, John Wray describes the mediocrity of being surrounded by greatness: Who did I think I was, with my childish, provincial, self-indulgent scribblings?
...moreThe critic giveth and he taketh away. In his review of Better Living Through Criticism, Jonathon Sturgeon counters A.O. Scott’s aversion to the idea of the critic as parasite: Maybe the loneliness of the American critic stems from his obsession with freeing minds, which quickly become isolated monads.
...moreBrooklyn is a place of layers both personal and historical, one that, as Colm Tóibín puts it, is “full of ghosts.” Reflecting on the recent film adaptation of his novel, the Brooklyn author observes one of the borough’s more visible specters: You could invent yourself here, even if the term self-invention was not yet understood […]
...moreThe latest installment in the trend of adapting the unadaptable is none other than Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, a sprawling, digressive novel to which director Robert Falls has allotted five hours of mixed-media stage time. Performances will begin at Chicago’s Goodman Theater on February 6. Bring snacks.
...moreUnplugging is bound to free up some time; spending that time is another matter. After reading Mindful Tech, David M. Levy’s book about how and why we use devices, Matthew J.X. Malady decided to give the simple life a try: I ran to the store for things we didn’t really need, and watered plants that […]
...more