The Genius and the Nobody: Lynne Tillman’s Men and Apparitions
Make it new, the modernists said. But how to rebuild the living body?
...moreBecome a Rumpus Member
Join NOW!Make it new, the modernists said. But how to rebuild the living body?
...moreKatia 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.”
...moreJon McGregor discusses his newest novel, Reservoir 13, his writing process, and why he chose not to sidestep the “missing girl” trope.
...moreBlake Nelson discusses his new book, Boy, letting his characters find their own fates, and possibly, maybe, being just the right amount of famous.
...morePatrick 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).
...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.
...moreBrian Booker discusses his debut collection Are You Here For What I’m Here For?, giving characters strange and unusual names, and sleeping sickness.
...moreIn 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.
...moreI 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 […]
...moreIt’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, […]
...moreIn 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 […]
...moreReading 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 […]
...moreLauren 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.
...more“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.”
...moreOver 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.
...moreThe 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 […]
...moreThe 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.
...moreI 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 […]
...moreFive 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 […]
...more