Gabe Habash’s Stephen Florida is a three-hundred page manic unraveling of the titular Stephen’s psyche, told over the course of one season of collegiate wrestling. In the opening pages, Stephen states his intentions in no ambiguous terms: he is going to win the NCAA Division Four wrestling championship. The novel is the fast-paced story of […]
...moreLee Clay Johnson discusses his novel Nitro Mountain, growing up with bluegrass musician parents, and what people are capable of under the right set of circumstances.
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The Rumpus Book Club chats with Saša Stanišić about his novel Before the Feast, the challenge of writing a plural narrator, working with a translator, and book tours in Germany.
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Rebecca Schiff discusses her debut collection The Bed That Moved, choosing narrators who share similarities with each other and with herself, and whether feminism and fiction-writing conflict.
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Lincoln Michel talks about his debut short story collection, Upright Beasts, his interest in monsters, and what sources of culture outside of literature inspire him.
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Novelist Jamie Kornegay talks about his debut, Soil, life in Mississippi, writing humor effectively, and the geography of isolation.
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Darcey Steinke talks about her new novel, Sister Golden Hair, motherlessness, the Southern cult of femininity, and how becoming a woman has changed since she came of age in a small city in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
...moreStory|Houston published a beautiful story this week in their Fall 2014 issue, all of which centers around the theme of family, functional or otherwise. “Termites” tells the story of Tamara, aka Tam or Tam-Tam, a youngish woman living in and trying to take care of/sell her family’s childhood home on Staten Island. As you might […]
...moreAt The Millions, Darcey Steinke gives an elegy for her Southern hero, Barry Hannah. She recalls their first interaction—when he called her to say a New Yorker review of her first novel had made him angry—and the relationship that followed. Most importantly, though, Steinke writes how Hannah offers a view of the South otherwise unexplored: […]
...moreThere aren’t many things that make sense, nakedly, without justification or explanation or exposition. But George Saunders reading Barry Hannah and Grace Paley does. For the New Yorker‘s Page Turner, he leafs through Paley’s “Love,” Hannah’s “The Wretched Seventies,” and chats about the reverberations of both. And if you haven’t checked out The Rumpus Book Club’s […]
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If you enjoyed Timothy Leo Taranto’s first and second rounds of literary puns, check out these new illustrations of such essential authors as Juneau Díaz and Karen Mussel
...moreJust so you know, Sunday is a good day to catch up with what Rumpus Books has been up to this week.
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