The Rumpus Interview with Kate Walbert
Author Kate Walbert talks about her new novel, The Sunken Cathedral, about the way cities change over time, and her approach to using footnotes in fiction.
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Posts Tagged: empathy
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Leslie Jamison
In which we discuss Frozen, Taylor Swift, the limits of empathy, the problem of happiness, and why we listen to sad songs over and over.
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The Rumpus Interview with Sean Michaels
The Rumpus talks to Sean Michaels about his new book, Us Conductors, challenging a reader’s empathy, and a true, strange musical instrument: the theremin.
...more“Yes. Of course. But yet. Anyway.”
Harper’s Magazine interviews Leslie Jamison about her debut, home-run collection of essays, The Empathy Exams: Essays. On the complications (and yet! necessity) of empathy, Jamison writes: So there’s a lot of danger attached to empathy: it might be self-serving or self-absorbed; it might lead our moral reasoning astray, or supplant moral reasoning entirely. (See this fantastic piece by Paul Bloom […]
...moreSocial Justice and the Power of Twitter
Rumpus editor Roxane Gay has a new essay at Salon discussing the power of Twitter and empathy in the wake of the Justine Sacco scandal. Social media can give people a voice in situations where those voices are usually silenced, but, she asks, at what price? Social media is something of a double-edged sword. At its […]
...moreReading Makes You Better At Life
A degree in English may make your job search harder, but it makes empathy and social interaction easier, according to a study conducted by some people who had more practical majors. The study, published in Science, found that literary fiction like Dostoevsky or Louise Erdrich enhanced subjects’ ability to read others’ emotions more than did popular […]
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Against Explanation, or How to Write Fiction About Mormons (Or Anybody)
The kind of knowledge that good fiction can impart is incomplete knowledge, knowledge that admits its gaps and urges a certain caution because of them
...moreWho Gets to Write the Review?
“The book review page is an odd cultural territory, often inhabited by such hybrid creatures — unlike their contemporaries in other disciplines, where the lines between critic and artist are more pronounced.” All readers are book critics, but disseminating literary opinions to the masses is only part of the job description for some of us. […]
...moreOne More Thing That Literature Is Good For
A few weeks ago, I went to a dermatologist to have something on my nose removed. He said less than two sentences to me, asked me one question he didn’t listen to the answer to, ignored my protests, had a nurse hold me down, stuck a large needle in my nose with no warning, and […]
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