Posts by author
Serena Candelaria
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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 to edit your novel in a piece featured on McSweeney’s.…
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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Last month, three of J.D. Salinger’s unpublished stories were leaked.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, “an incident only alluded to in the novel.” In an…
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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, “more novels are being written and published… than at any…
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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, and the labors that resulted in a book that he…
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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 Rumpus interviewee, sheds light on her creative process, Twitter, the…
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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, and explores the impact that names have on the way…
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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 Speak Emoji?” refers to emojis as “a new form of…
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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 illness, describing himself from the age of two on as…
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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 an interview with The Paris Review, Hempel recalls her first…
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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 the past five years. The plight of a writer who…
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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 been debates over the double standard to which the personalities…
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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 their favorite reads in contemporary short fiction, and invite guests…