The Reconstruction of Derrida: Peter Salmon’s An Event, Perhaps
The key insight is that names, and indeed all boundaries, involve a hierarchy.
...more
Posts Tagged: biography
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Janice P. Nimura
Janice P. Nimura discusses her new book, THE DOCTORS BLACKWELL.
...more
Bridging Narratives: Talking with Jenn Shapland
Jenn Shapland discusses her debut book, MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jenn Shapland
Jenn Shapland discusses MY AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CARSON MCCULLERS.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #173: Hanif Abdurraqib
“I mostly hope that upon putting down this book, a reader crafts their own love letter to someone living.”
...more
Dream Big: Hillary, Made Up by Marianne Kunkel
Hillary, Made Up is a complex feminist undertaking that undermines traditional notions of interpretation.
...more
Something Truer Than True: Talking with Kelly O’Connor McNees
Kelly O’Connor McNees discusses her new novel, Undiscovered Country, the timeliness of its story, and the genre of historical fiction.
...more
Make Your Choices: A Conversation with Chris Kraus
Chris Kraus discusses her latest book, After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography, writing about art under patriarchy, politics, and “the truth.”
...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
Visitations: Gwendolyn Brooks at One Hundred
A visitation is how I describe the past weeks walking with Gwendolyn Books. It is like she is just around every corner.
...more
Coursing Byways and Biographical Thoroughfares: Karin Roffman’s The Songs We Know Best: John Ashbery’s Early Life
I’ve long found that when reading Ashbery’s poetry it’s easy to lose track of just who the poet is.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #79: Kelcey Parker Ervick
The woman whose face appears on the Czech five-hundred koruna doesn’t appear there without consequence. During the late 19th century, politically active Božena Němcová was an innovator of Czech literature. Twenty-first century writer Kelcey Parker Ervick continues Němcová’s legacy in her own fairy tale-like work: a biographical collage, The Bitter Life of Božena Němcová. Comprised […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Lucy Jane Bledsoe discusses her latest book, A Thin Bright Line, uncovering the remarkable story of her aunt, and illuminating history through the lens of imagination.
...more
Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet by Terese Svoboda
Julie Enszer reviews Terese Svoboda’s Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge, Radical Poet today in Rumpus Poetry.
...more
The Big Idea: Dawn Tripp
Dawn Tripp discusses Georgia, her new novel based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s life, O’Keeffe’s distancing herself from feminism, and balancing biography with fiction.
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Janice N. Harrington
Janice N. Harrington on her new collection Primitive and critiquing the use of “primitive” to describe African American folk art.
...moreHitler’s Ghostwriter
New evidence uncovered by history professor and researcher Thomas Weber indicates that Hitler himself wrote the 1923 biography Adolf Hitler: His Life and His Speeches, which is credited to Baron Adolf Victor von Koerbe. Weber’s research implies that Hitler had designs on power earlier than historians originally thought, reports Dina Kraft for the New York Times. In the […]
...moreBeyond “The Lottery”
Although best known for “The Lottery”, there was much more to Shirley Jackson’s work—and life. At the New York Times, Charles McGrath reviews of Ruth Franklin’s new biography A Rather Haunted Life, and explores Franklin’s journalistic yet personal take on the woman who remains massively influential, but often overlooked in the American literary canon. In spite of (and […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with William Hjorstberg
William Hjorstberg talks about his new book, the heady writing days in Livingstone, Montana, being a “Hollywood whore,” and the finer points of Richard Brautigan.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Terese Svoboda
Poet Terese Svoboda talks about her biography of the socialist-anarchist firebrand and modernist poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You, and remembers a time when the political was printed in newspapers.
...moreThe Lives of Others
We’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of understanding the person behind the work. For Lit Hub, Heller McAlpin examines a long tradition of writing about writers: There’s a special frisson of pleasure in reading about writers’ early struggles when you know what the future holds for them—which in the case of most of these […]
...moreDon’t Quit Your Day Job
But dip into nearly any of Stevens’s poems, to the last, and be braced by a voice like none other, in its knitted playfulness and in its majesty. For most of his life, Wallace Stevens worked a day job as an insurance executive, and yet he still found time to become one of the greatest […]
...moreLike Exile
Stuck at home with numerous young children, with a husband who had little interest in her work and actively discouraged her intellectual pursuits, Howe rebelled in small ways. In the late 1840s, Howe secretly began to write a novel. She described the book as a “history of a strange creature,” and it tells the story […]
...moreFinding Kafka
Was Franz Kafka really a tortured neurotic writer? A new biography shows a different side of the surreal German writer: He loved beer and slapstick. He undertook a fitness regime popularized by a Danish exercise guru. He tried to cheat on his high-school exams. He used his desk as a metaphor for self-parody and waxed lyrical […]
...more
Joan Didion: Conservative to Liberal
How exactly did Joan Didion go from writing for conservative weekly the National Review to serving as a leading voice for the left? The New Yorker offers an answer: What changed was her understanding of where dropouts come from, of why people turn into runaways and acidheads and members of the Symbionese Liberation Army, why parents abandon their […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Banning Eyre
Producer, senior editor, Afropop expert, and author Banning Eyre talks about his new book, Lion Songs, a 15-years-in-the-making biography of Zimbabwe’s legendary musician Thomas Mapfumo.
...moreAn American Writer from Russia
At the New Yorker, John Colapinto explores Nabokov’s quintessentially American classic, Lolita, and just how a Russian-born writer could so perfectly capture American culture as an emigre, working specifically with Robert Roper’s new biography on the great writer, Nabokov in America: On the Road to ‘Lolita.’ Of specific and extremely endearing interest: Nabokov’s obsession with […]
...moreFigure Drawing, Or, The Posthumous Persona Of David Foster Wallace
On the eve of a new biopic and on the long tail of posthumous publishing and popularization—Christian Lorentzen takes a long, compassionate, critical look at David Foster Wallace and on the ways in which a prolific writer gets written into the public memory—as intellectual behemoth, creative luminary, contemptuous snob, major depressive, motivational speaker: A writer who courted […]
...moreThe Ways of Hemingway’s Heart
A new account of Hemingway’s love life—which famously spanned four marriages and could be said to include complex relationships with a number of male confidants—is forthcoming from A.E. Hochner, one of Hemingway’s dear friends in the last years of his life. The book is based in part on recorded conversations with the author, and serves […]
...more