Let Math Decide Your Novel’s Fate
Are you worried that your novel contains too many adverbs or too much white space or lacks the proper rhythm? Despair no more. Joy Lazendorfer writes on how you can use math…
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Serena Candelaria
98 posts
Serena Candelaria is a Rumpus intern, and a self-proclaimed fiction addict. This summer, she worked at 29th Street Publishing and began writing a novella. She is currently a senior at Yale, where she studies Literature.
A Young Holden Caulfield
Last month, three of J.D. Salinger’s unpublished stories were leaked. One of these stories, “The Ocean Full of Bowling Balls,” includes a young Holden Caulfield, and describes his brother’s death,…
A Labor of Love
In an essay in The Millions, Dominic Smith sets out to answer the question, “How many novelists are at work in America?” Despite panic about the death of the novel,…
David L. Ulin On Writing
David L. Ulin writes about his first book(s) in an essay featured by The Paris Review. He recounts boyhood ambitions, drafts that never came to be any more than that,…
Writing in Bed
The fact is that I write under duress, often in my bed, often at the last minute. I’m kind of a binge writer, I would say… Lena Dunham, a former…
By Any Other Name
How are we affected by our names? An article in The New Yorker by Rumpus interviewee Maria Konnikova discusses the implications of given names as indicators of class and racial backgrounds,…
When Language Fails
2013 has become the year of the emoji as the pictographs have made their way into iMessages, poem translations, and recently, an art exhibition. Betsy Morais’ article called “Do You…
Coping with Anxiety
Editor of The Atlantic, Scott Stossel, suffers from anxiety, and he’s hardly alone. In an essay called “Surviving Anxiety,” Stossel chronicles his lifetime battle with the nation’s most common mental…
Write Your Worst Secret
Amy Hempel started writing fiction in her late twenties when she took a workshop with Gordon Lish at Columbia; she stayed in this workshop as a student for years. In…
The Stories of Osama Alomar
In a recent essay in The New Yorker, Lydia Davis discusses the very short stories of Osama Alomar, a young Syrian writer who has lived in the United States for…
This Year in Literature and Gender
Matters of gender and sexuality come to the surface repeatedly in the scuffles discussed in The New Yorker piece called “Literary Feuds of 2013.” In the past year, there have…
For the Love of Short Fiction
The Short Form, a website featuring literary excerpts and reading recommendations, is a true gift to readers and writers of short stories. Sarahana Shrestha and Peter Cavanaugh collaborate to catalogue…
