Features & Reviews
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What to Read When the World Is Unreliable
Instead of sorting through all the crazy news stories this weekend, we suggest taking a break with some unreliable narrators in a few far more worthwhile novels.
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A Very Great Scoundrel: The Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Volume III: Diaries, Journals, and Notebooks
In hindsight, it’s sometimes difficult not to read more than a bit of sadomasochism into Hopkins’s inner passions and the ways in which he resisted them.
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A Language in Constant Rebellion: Talking with Aura Xilonen
Aura Xilonen discusses her novel, Gringo Champion, the realities of immigration, translating texts, and her love of cinema.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #84: Susan DeFreitas
Picture this: a curbside juggler with a rose between his teeth. That’s the opening image of Susan DeFreitas’s powerful debut novel, Hot Season. Vivid (and sometimes strange) images strike again and again, conjuring ponderosa pines, cafés, old houses, and new…
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Haunted by Child Refugees: Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends
These aren’t ghosts; these are children who have braved a perilous journey to escape the violent nightmares back home.
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All Writing Is Political: A Conversation with Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid discusses his new novel, Exit West, hope in fiction as a form of resistance, the necessity of learning to accept social change, and how much America and Pakistan have come to resemble each other.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Chen Chen
Chen Chen discusses his new collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, playing the game white supremacy has set up, and if God is trying and failing to be a cool dad.
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Family Is the Deepest Scar: Minae Mizumura’s Inheritance from Mother
With each word, I found myself thinking of my own grandmother’s journey, escaping war to America with no money, no education, and six children, the pain of this experience inevitably hardening the whole family.
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Jessie Chaffee’s Florence in Ecstasy
He is a bird, he and that silver scull, a bird. Would I ever have that grace?
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All of the Facts and None of the Truth: Fox Frazier-Foley’s Like Ash in the Air after Something Has Burned
While these women are physically gone, they gain agency after their deaths through Frazier-Foley’s poems.
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Blur, Cross, Pulverize, Confront, Remember: Talking with James Allen Hall
James Allen Hall on I Liked You Better Before I Knew You So Well, unmaking boundaries, and book titles.
