What to Read When Life is in Chaos
How Books Can Be a Framework When Everything Else Feels Like It’s Falling Apart
What to Read When
278 posts
Themed reading recommendation lists from The Rumpus’s editorial staff and guest authors.
What to Read When You Want to Find Mystery in the Ordinary
...I find myself most excited about writing that is focused on the concrete facts of daily life.
What to Read When You Can’t Catch a Break
What reliably got me out of that slump was writing more and reading literature that lifted me out of my immediate crisis (I can’t go on!) and into the world (and yet we must!).
What to Read When You’re Looking for Romance
Throughout history, the marauding aristocracy has torn away people from their land and community, most recently in the formation of the modern industrial nation.
What to Read When You’re a True Believer
One thing I always tell my students is, "your story matters," because I want them to believe their observations about themselves and the world around them are worth writing about.
What to Read When You’re Freaking out About Earthquakes
When I was six months pregnant, I became obsessed with the Cascadia earthquake.
What to Read When You Want to Shake Up the Syllabus
I would love to see more literature courses used to bring canonical books into conversation with other authors, taking another writer’s point of view to expand and critique the lens offered by the canon.
What to Read When Walking Through a Graveyard
What is lost so that a book may live? What is shoveled so that a memoir may memorialize?
What to Read When You Need to Blaze a New Trail
One wonders: doesn’t the cream always rise to the top? If not, whose responsibility is it to change that?
What to Read When You Don’t Want to Write
Writing is a solitary venture that can get very lonely. I like having the presence of other writers around and just thinking about writing can generate a spark.
What to Read When You Want to be Stirred
I like books that mean something in and outside of their own narratives, impacting my worldview. The stirring can be felt in beautiful writing, or powerful concepts, deep analysis, or emotion that resonates off the page.
What to Read When You Want to Get Lost
I wanted my novel, Lesser Ruins, to feel at ease getting lost, to relish in its obsessions and procrastinations, from long descriptions of electronic music to digressions about coffee to the strange, suffocating world of academia.