The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Andrew Bertaina
“Life is incredibly sad, but it’s also funny, joyful, wonderful, and strange.”
...more
Posts Tagged: Alice Munro
Making Sure It Fits: A Conversation with Jon Chaiim McConnell
Jon Chaiim McConnell discusses his new novella, THRUM.
...more
Touch the Bear: Talking with Blair Hurley
Blair Hurley discusses her debut novel, THE DEVOTED.
...more
No-Man’s Land: A Conversation with Angela Mitchell
Angela Mitchell discusses her debut collection, UNNATURAL HABITATS & OTHER STORIES.
...more
Circling Backwards, Snaking Sideways: Talking with Sharlene Teo
Sharlene Teo discusses her debut novel, PONTI.
...more
In the Spirit of Curiosity: Talking with Jamel Brinkley
Jamel Brinkley discusses his debut story collection, A LUCKY MAN.
...more
What Remains of a Self: Joanna Luloff’s Remind Me Again What Happened
Remind Me Again What Happened becomes a story not just of selfhood, but also of sovereignty.
...more
Reading Other People’s Mail: Talking with Michelle Dean
Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, literary legends, and the absence of Black writers from the narrative.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Gabrielle Bell
Gabrielle Bell discusses her forthcoming graphic memoir, Everything Is Flammable, what it was like to mine her own life for subject matter, and how anxiety affects her work.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #67: Anuradha Roy
A tranquil beach town named Jarmuli is the setting of Anuradha Roy’s third novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and made the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Four older women travel as friends in search of a bucolic vacation, and a young woman, contending with the […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Paula Whyman
Paula Whyman discusses her debut collection You May See a Stranger, discovering truth in fiction, and how memory interferes with good storytelling.
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Christine Sneed
Floyd Skloot interviews Christine Sneed about her latest story collection, The Virginity of Famous Men.
...moreMapping Munro
Who else can write a story like that? Over at Lit Hub, Elizabeth Poliner, author of As Close to Us as Breathing, writes about her formative years as a writer: diagramming Alice Munro short stories to get a better sense of appreciation, craft, and sheer awe.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Joanna Walsh
Joanna Walsh discusses her story collection, Vertigo, consciousness, artifice, and simultaneity.
...moreOur Literary Footpaths
Over at The Toast, Rebecca Turkewitz writes about the intersections between literary geography and the real, from Joyce’s Dublin and Tolkien’s Middle Europe to Faulkner’s Mississippi and Munro’s Ontario—how we explore these places by walking through pages, and how they map to our homes and street corners.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Laurie Foos
Laurie Foos discusses her latest novel, The Blue Girl, feminism, Michael Jackson, and mythical moon pies.
...moreIf Writers Were Baseball Players
With giddiness over the National League Championship, Lit Hub imagines the amusing fantasy lineup of players if the baseball teams were made up entirely of writers. Pitting Jennifer Egan and George Saunders against Malcolm Gladwell and Alice Munro, the list is an entertaining interpretation of writers’ styles translating into athletic skill.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Maggie Nelson
Author Maggie Nelson talks about matrophobia, “sodomitical maternity,” breaking down categories between genres of writing, and her new book, The Argonauts.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Skip Horack
Skip Horack talks about his new novel, The Other Joseph, blending research with fiction, and living with the “curse of the fiction writer.”
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Thomas H. McNeely
Thomas H. McNeely discusses coming of age in the 1970s, Houston’s complicated racial history, and his new novel Ghost Horse.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
On Wednesday, Joyland published “You Said ‘Always’” an excerpt from Ester Bloom’s novel-in-progress, The Sex Lives of Other People. In the story, which has the momentous feel of the novel’s opening, the narrator, Annie, gets dumped by her boyfriend after a night of sex, turned down by her soon-to-be ex-husband, disappointed by her sister on […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, Margaret Atwood released Stone Mattress, a collection of “wonderfully weird short stories.” Stone Mattress is Atwood’s eighth collection of stories, not to mention her 14 novels and other formidable volumes of poetry, children’s literature, and nonfiction. Reviewers across the boards are heralding this most recent work as “wise, sharp,” and “rich.” Let’s look at […]
...moreDear Alice
Alice Munro’s birthday was last week (happy belated, Alice!). She’s also Elliott Holt‘s favorite writer, and over at Literary Mothers, Elliott wrote a beautiful letter to her: Your stories provide deeply private pleasures. You are our writer, part of our family. Now that you’ve won the Nobel, even more people have joined our ranks. And I’m […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Coming off the holiday weekend, the trusted dispensary of short fiction, Joyland, published “The History of Hanging Out” by Kevin Mandel. Mandel’s story lives up to its title, encapsulating the bundled, sparking energies of a group of young creators. If you’ve ever started a band or a literary magazine, you’ll recognize yourself and your gang in this […]
...moreFatal Short Stories
Depictions of death in short stories can challenge even seasoned writers. John McDonough, writing in the Colorado Review, explains why: The immediacy of the death of a loved one offers rich emotional possibilities, but ones that are remarkably complicated. Mine these emotions too heavily and you run the risk of sentimentality, but too cautious an […]
...morePeter Orner’s Favorite Short Stories
I’ll say it: [“Idiots First”] is the most moving American story ever written. (Until I change my mind.) For online magazine Ozy, Rumpus columnist Peter Orner collects some of his very favorite short stories. They range from North American classics by Bernard Malamud and Alice Munro to work by Mexican author Juan Rulfo and murdered South […]
...more“The Woes of the Wannabe”
The prospect of publication, the urgent need, as they see it, to publish as soon as possible, colors everything [my students] do….It will be hard for those who have never suffered this obsession to appreciate how all-conditioning and all-consuming it can be. Why are unpublished writers mocked and published writers respected, even by people who […]
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
Having a social life on weekends is fun, but what if you missed our killer Rumpus weekend features?! No worries, we’ve collected them for you here. On Saturday, Shawn Andrew Mitchell reviewed Dark Lies the Island by recent Rumpus interviewee Kevin Barry: In one paragraph a poet-narrator might describe how “the sky had shucked the last […]
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Dear Alice
A celebration of Alice Munro’s Nobel Prize.
...more
Lisa’s Book Round-Up
I wouldn’t be much of a book columnist if I didn’t celebrate Alice Munro and her much deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. It surprises me, the number of people who have never read Munro. If you’re one of them, you might start here. In 2004, Jonathan Franzen made an appeal in The New York Times […]
...more