Reviews Archives - Page 55 of 221 - The Rumpus

A Full-Throated Cry from a Clarion: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan

We seem to be floating in a weird soup of truthiness and alternative facts. Perhaps the state of American life explains the explosive power of The Book of Joan, or perhaps it’s the other way around; perhaps, at last, American life is ready for Lidia Yuknavitch.

Marie Howe Is Magic: Reading Magdalene

Howe’s Magdalene is ambitious in its reach and strangely timely, as American society has swung to the right and, in the process, against the tide of equality for women.

Jessa Crispin Can’t Do It Alone in Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto

Crispin’s writing strikes a tone that at times parallels neoconservative—even alt-right—pundits: commentary peppered with political injunctions, not criticism.

A Portrait of the Writing Process: Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood

Chew-Bose approaches the word essay less as a noun and more as a verb.

Only Patricia Lockwood Could Get Away with Priestdaddy

As we know from her poetry, Lockwood’s humor can shape-shift into something else entirely, something quite moving.

The Teenage Girl in All of Us: Last Sext by Melissa Broder

Last Sext captures a youthful, hard, myth-informed, sleep deprived, aroused, spiritually searching, self-loathing worldview embraced by many of the young women in our lives.

Fantasy Is a Writer’s Most Powerful Weapon: Literature Class, Berkeley 1980

The reality of the horror cannot be put into words, cannot be realistically described; it can only enter through imagination.

Living Outside the Narrative in Elif Batuman’s The Idiot

The Idiot dramatizes the alienation, and even heartbreak, of losing the narrative thread of your existence.

What It Means to Hold and Be Held in Jennifer Givhan’s Protection Spell

The book explores ambiguities—in terms of race, in terms of motherhood, but especially in terms of the body and the subconscious.

The Myth of the Troubled Female in Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

Sometimes it's necessary to shift one's moral compass, and sometimes it's necessary to destroy it.

The Lucky Ones Are Those Who Do Not Disappear

Pachico offers is an anthropological view of small, beautifully evoked human experiences—an ethnography of survival, memory, and nostalgia.

Lines Like Poems unto Themselves: Anthony Madrid’s Try Never

My favorite poems in this book aren’t my favorites because of what they say or do as poems, but because they have the best individual lines.

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