Apocalypse Yesterday: Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes
The Membranes is a climate novel not because it contends with catastrophe, but because it shows that everydayness has a way of proceeding alongside disaster.
Features & Reviews
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Reading Fiction As an Act of Resistance: A Conversation with Azar Nafisi
We need fiction because fiction does not polarize. Fiction is based on understanding over judgment.
Rumpus Book Club Excerpt: Animal Bodies by Suzanne Roberts
An excerpt from Suzanne Roberts' Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, & Other Difficulties forthcoming from Nebraska Press, March 2022
Catalyst Events and a Time for Poetry: An Interview with Charles Flowers
Consider: My coming out story has been told, but coming out is constantly changing and shifting and needs retelling, and each telling has value for a particular audience.
A Dreamscape of Longing: Two Big Differences by Ian Ross Singleton
Zina’s observations of her time in Detroit crystallize both a feeling of otherness and a wry critique of the young American activists who celebrated socialist ideas without fully appreciating the legacy of Soviet rule in Ukraine.
How Wonderful It Is to Be So Moved: A Conversation with Sarah Krasnostein
The most truthful we can be in a factual genre is to doubt the attainability of fact at all.
What to Read When You Want to Be a Bad Girl
Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of DON'T SAY WE DIDN'T WARN YOU, shares a reading list for when you want to be a Bad Girl.
Using Form to Transform: Come Clean by Joshua Nguyen
If I had a dollar for every word I have written about BIPOC representation in entertainment media, I still wouldn’t have enough to pay back my student loans and car loans.
Cigarettes and Wittgenstein: The Rumpus Interview with Sean Thor Conroe
The [novel's] main question would be, How does a man stuck in resentment and anger at others and the world, who lacks a sense of belonging and sense of his usefulness in the world, find his way out of that?
The Everyday Practice of Art:The Loft Generation by Edith Schloss
Her writing is quiet, perhaps even naive. But Schloss is enamored by the minutiae of her subjects, and the exactness and delicacy of her details ripple out like water. Trying to focus on one aspect of the book would be to let the entire thing go.
Joy in Persistence: Siri Hustvedt on Writing and the Need for Adaptive Grandiosity
Everyone, even the most tell-all writer, withholds something in the interests of protecting herself or others, but my interest in my own stories has always been to use them to illustrate larger stories about the culture . . .
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Eva Jurczyk
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Eva Jurczyk about her debut novel, Department of Rare Books & Special Collections (Poisoned Pen Press, January 2022), and its structure, art capers, and more.…