What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Women’s History
Rumpus editors share for their favorite writing that speaks to women’s history past, present, and future.
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Posts Tagged: Edith Wharton
Titanic Turns Twenty in a World That Won’t Talk About It
After twenty years and eleven Oscars and eleventy billion dollars, we still don’t really talk about Titanic.
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What to Read When You Don’t Want Summer to End
A list of books that take place in the summer, remind us of summer, and/or just make for great beach reads.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #91: Meghan Lamb
Author Meghan Lamb‘s new novel, Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, March 2017), is a book that cuts to the core of disturbance. In it, a woman is struck by an inexplicable and undiagnosable illness that renders her immobile and takes away her ability to speak. Her husband must become her caretaker, living with a woman […]
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Saying What Shouldn’t Be Said: A Conversation with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, why writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world, and finding truths in fiction.
...moreFoundations of Obscure Humanity
If the very rich were to admit that the society in which they live such lush lives is not only immoral but unnatural, it might demand, say, a massive redistribution of their wealth! Over at Lit Hub, Colette Shade writes about Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth as an indictment of income inequality in Gilded […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Keith Lee Morris
Keith Lee Morris discusses his latest book Traveler’s Rest, Lewis and Clark, and how writing a novel about dreams requires much more than sleep.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: How To Make Sure Your Writing Is Forgotten
Do you really want to have to listen from the grave as students discuss your themes and scholars analyze your syntax and trace your influence?
...moreEdith Wharton’s Lost Story
An unpublished Edith Wharton story was recently discovered at Yale University by Dr. Alice Kelly. It’s called “The Field of Honour” and is set during World War I: Wharton was very much engaged with the war, she worked for a time as a war reporter, and in her fiction she wanted to write about the […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Kate Bolick
Kate Bolick talks about her new book, Spinster: Making a Life of One’s Own, writing and the nuclear family, and whether women are finally people yet.
...moreBeauty is Truth, Truth Beauty
I never recoiled, in that first season, to hear the nice people on the bus say “beautiful baby,” to us in reverent tones. It’s a thanksgiving for safe passage, a prayer for all new defenseless things. But after a few months have passed … faint suggestions of the adult visage emerge. … And if you have […]
...moreHenry James & The Great YA Debate
Responding to the ongoing debate about whether or not American literature is saturated with young adult fiction (and if adults should read these novels), Christopher Beha, in the New Yorker, addresses A.O. Scott’s recent essay in the New York Times Magazine. While Scott dismisses Henry James and Edith Wharton as “outliers,” Beha refutes this point, […]
...moreFictional Characters Are Not Your Friends
Critics who fault a character’s unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability. In a cheekily titled BuzzFeed Books essay, “Not Here to Make Friends,” our essays editor Roxane Gay talks about the knotty issue of […]
...moreSeeing What Wharton Saw
Jason Diamond writes about how he came to a deeper understanding of Edith Wharton, her work, and the New York neighborhood where she grew up and which Diamond “once tried so hard to avoid.” Wharton is one of the few great fiction writers whose work takes on a different meaning when you begin to understand […]
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Saturday History Lesson: That Time Edith Wharton Wrote Erotica
If you’ve never been to an archive, this is what it’s like: you will go mad from the hum of cranked up air-conditioning. You are usually only allowed to bring a pencil.
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The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Me Be Pretty One Day
When I was younger and lonelier and knew more about other people than I did about myself, I thought
...moreEdith Wharton’s Lost Letters
In the upcoming New Yorker, Rebecca Mead writes about Edith Wharton’s letters to her governess, Anna Bahlmann. “Wharton had requested that her letters be destroyed, but Bahlmann’s family ignored her wishes and, for the past ninety years, their correspondence sat in storage. On Wednesday, June 24th, the letters—which have not been seen until now—will be […]
...moreThe Emperor’s Children
Joanna Smith Rakoff’s debut novel follows a group of friends through the trials and triumphs of post-college life in New York.
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