The Genius and the Nobody: Lynne Tillman’s Men and Apparitions
Make it new, the modernists said. But how to rebuild the living body?
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Posts Tagged: characters
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Katia D. Ulysse
Katia D. Ulysse discusses her forthcoming novel, Mouths Don’t Speak, the importance of religion and music in the novel and in Haitian culture, and why Haiti will always be “home.”
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jon McGregor
Jon McGregor discusses his newest novel, Reservoir 13, his writing process, and why he chose not to sidestep the “missing girl” trope.
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On Searching for Honesty in Writing: An Interview with Blake Nelson
Blake Nelson discusses his new book, Boy, letting his characters find their own fates, and possibly, maybe, being just the right amount of famous.
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The Rumpus Interview with Patrick Ryan
Patrick Ryan discusses his new collection The Dream Life of Astronauts, the “bad old days,” and the human need to believe that everything will turn out okay in the end (even when we know it won’t).
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Lee Clay Johnson
Lee 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.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Brian Booker
Brian Booker discusses his debut collection Are You Here For What I’m Here For?, giving characters strange and unusual names, and sleeping sickness.
...moreRemembering Killed-Off Characters
In an epic confessional letter at Lit Hub, author Stuart Nadler mourns all the characters he’s abandoned, maimed, and murdered for the sake of the grueling writing process. These lost creations and their universes live on in his memories and drafts that will never see the light of day.
...moreIn Conversation with Elizabeth Strout
I love all my characters; every single person I write about, I love. So as I write them, I don’t care how badly they misbehave, because they are who they are, they do what they do. In an interview with the Guardian, Elizabeth Strout talks about her latest novel, My Name Is Lucy Barton, the importance […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
It’s July, and the summer issues of literary magazines are rolling off both the physical and cyber presses, including Virginia Quarterly Review, which this week shared a story from its summer print issue online. In “Dixon” by Bret Anthony Johnston, author of the bestselling novel Remember Me Like This and the award-winning collection Corpus Christi, […]
...moreWho Are You Writing For?
In the American imagination the black woman, whether light skinned or dark, is already a sexualized entity, a character upon which so many stereotypes are projected. But as a black woman writing these characters, I need to write beyond the stereotypes, expose their idiocy one page at a time. Morgan Jerkins writes about the complications […]
...moreInfluencing Writing by Reading
Reading is an important part of developing as a writer. But what happens when all the books and authors we read are a homogenous group of white males? Non-white, non-male writers may still end up defaulting to writing about white male characters. Victoria Cho examines why she often found herself creating straight, white, male characters even […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Lauren Groff
Lauren Groff talks about her new novel, Fates and Furies, the life of creative people and those who love them, and why she’s grateful to anyone who reads books.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Growing Up Gaming
“Is this inclusive or exclusive?” he asked with a creased brow. “I don’t like the idea that we’re being treated as a joke.”
...moreA Character By Any Other Name
Over at the New Yorker, Sam Sacks considers why “in recent years, a curious number of novelists have declined to avail themselves of that basic prerogative: naming their creations,” letting a deluge of nameless characters emerge.
...moreWhat Does Anna Karenina Look Like?
The Paris Review has an excerpt from Peter Mendelsund’s book What We See When We Read that questions what we think we know about characters. Mendelsund points out that many of us feel like we know our favorite characters intimately, but when asked about what they look like don’t have specific answers. And maybe, he suggests, authors […]
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The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium: Interview with Nick Bertozzi
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Tuesday nights from 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City.
...moreDo Likable Characters Equal Likable Stories?
I wonder if that is the case for many of us. Perhaps, in the widespread longing for likable characters, there is this: a desire, through fiction, for contact with what we’ve armored ourselves against in the rest of our lives, a desire to be reminded that it’s possible to open our eyes, to see, to […]
...moreCharacters, Too Inspired
Five years ago Lynn Coady published a novel with a protagonist drawn partially from the life of a real, thirty-years-deceased poet, and a experienced firsthand earful from an audience full of the poet’s colleagues and friends. It wasn’t all ugly, but it was complicated, as feedback focused almost entirely on either the novel’s too-close-for-comfort portrait […]
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