autobiographical fiction
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The Rumpus Interview with Mila Jaroniec
Mila Jaroniec talks about her debut novel Plastic Vodka Bottle Sleepover,” writing autofiction, the surprising similarity between selling sex toys and selling books, and the impact of having a baby on editing.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Leslie Pietrzyk
Think about the stories you have inside that scare you. That’s what you should be writing.
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The Rumpus Interview with Mark Leyner
Mark Leyner discusses his new novel, Gone with the Mind, about a failed novelist, Mark Leyner, who gives a reading to his mom in an almost-deserted food court.
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The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell discusses his debut novel, What Belongs to You, crossing boundaries, language as defense, and the queer tradition of novel writing that blurs boundaries between fiction and essay and autobiography.
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The Rumpus Interview with Mary Karr
Mary Karr talks about her new book The Art of Memoir, the perception of memoir from a “trashy” form, the virtues of poetry, and the complexity of truth-telling.
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The Rumpus Interview with Phoebe Gloeckner
Artist and author Phoebe Gloeckner talks about her semi-autobiographical novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl, just adapted into a film starring Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgard, and what she’s working on now.
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Novelist Anne Roiphe on 50 Years of Writing
After her first marriage to a writer ended when she was twenty-seven, Roiphe decided to tell her story in the autobiographical novel, Digging Out, and it launched her long, successful career: I look at the long shelf of books I…
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One and The Same
Nosy readers often delight in sleuthing out the parallels between an author’s work and their life, as if an identifiable autobiographical source might change the meaning behind the words. So what happens when authors eliminate the boundary altogether? By calling…
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Iris Has Free Time by Iris Smyles
Brachah Goykadosh reviews IRIS HAS FREE TIME by Iris Smyles today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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Why We Write About What We Write About
At the New York Review of Books‘s blog, Tim Parks explores how authors might subconsciously get inspiration for their novels from unresolved personal conflicts. Specifically, he reflects on the lives of Chekhov and Faulkner, making connections between their real-life hardships and the…
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Jim Shepard on Writing Fiction That’s Got Some Truth to It
“The first worry writers have when they consider working with something like historical events has to do with the issue of authority: as in, where do I get off writing about that? Well, here’s the good and the bad news: …
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Is Your Novel Autobiographical?
Academics spend their careers studying how autobiographical novels are. Readers spend hours obsessing over it. But in a brief interview with The New Yorker’s Book Bench, Aleksandar Hemon may have answered the age old question about whether his novel is…