Ward’s Mississippi Is Our Mississippi: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Capturing the Delta in harrowing detail, Ward takes readers on a journey from her own home of the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
...more
Posts Tagged: Faulkner
Wisdom Is a Double-Edged Sword: Talking with Jay Baron Nicorvo
Jay Baron Nicorvo discusses his debut novel, The Standard Grand, how easy it is for civilians to forget about soldiers and veterans, and his longstanding love of animals.
...more
Making a Narrative in the Darkness: A Conversation with Samantha Hunt
Samantha Hunt discusses her new collection, The Dark Dark, why she became a writer, and the freeing quiet of darkness.
...more
J. M. Coetzee’s “Bread and Beans” Writing
I am fixated by this detail of the bread and beans because it strikes me that Coetzee’s prose might itself be described as “bread and beans” writing: short, declarative sentences, with a fairly simple vocabulary.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Jonathan Corcoran
Jonathan Corcoran discusses his debut collection The Rope Swing, Appalachian writing communities, getting disowned by his family for coming out, and his father’s death.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: Rosanne Cash’s Black Cadillac
In her voice, I am held, cradled even. I am equal parts longing and hope. I am home.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Leland Cheuk
Leland Cheuk discusses his novel The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, dark humor, cancer, morally corrupt characters, and his mother.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Jesse Lee Kercheval
I have learned to put myself, my ego, to one side and truly experience someone else’s poetry.
...moreA Tale of Two Siblings
For the New York Times’s Bookends column, Thomas Mallon and Leslie Jamison muse on the books that best capture the intricate and fraught relationships between siblings: That’s what I felt Faulkner intuited about siblings: that there were all sorts of gaps and harms and distances that might befall them, that they might inflict on each other, […]
...more
Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #22: Classic Novels That Are a Joy to Read
Sometimes we bypass the classic novels on the way to the rich offering of current literary fiction. Fair enough; there is so much to love in today’s fiction. But once in a while, dust off a classic gem and consider the language, the depth, the metaphorical heft these books carry—along with being engrossing, powerful reads. Reading […]
...moreWriters and Moral Obligation
At the New York Times Book Ends column this week, Zoë Heller and Francine Prose discuss whether or not William Faulkner’s famous quote, “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art,” holds up. In other words, Heller asks, does producing great art excuse terrible human behavior? Her conclusion is that no, it doesn’t. Prose seems to […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Sunil Yapa
Sunil Yapa discusses his debut novel, Your Heart is a Muscle the Size of a Fist, radical empathy, growing up surrounded by politics, and losing the first draft of his novel in Chile.
...moreOur Literary Footpaths
Over at The Toast, Rebecca Turkewitz writes about the intersections between literary geography and the real, from Joyce’s Dublin and Tolkien’s Middle Europe to Faulkner’s Mississippi and Munro’s Ontario—how we explore these places by walking through pages, and how they map to our homes and street corners.
...moreAnother Lost Work by a Dead Writer
If it seems that “lost” books, short stories, and everything else are coming out of the woodwork, well, they are. The Strand magazine has just published Twixt Cup and Lip, an early play by William Faulkner written in the 1920s: The Strand describes the play as “a light-hearted jazz age story.” Prohibition is under way, and […]
...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Old Friends Or Lovers
I was becoming awed by the wide horizon of the speech that arose out of an individual life lived in a single era and generation. I was becoming attracted to the writer’s creativity.
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Thorpe Moeckel
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Thorpe Moeckel about his new book Arcadia Road, the challenge of writing long poems, raising twins, and camo thongs.
...moreUnderstanding Faulkner
Richard Grant discusses how his time living in Mississippi provided him with a more full understanding of William Faulkner’s language. Despite studying Faulkner at school in England, Grant felt that it wasn’t until he moved that he was able to totally appreciate Faulkner’s work: To sit on the old porch reading Mr. Bill, with a […]
...more
The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Joe Meno
Joe Meno and Margaret Wappler dive deep into his new book, Marvel and a Wonder, talking about race, masculinity, and rural America.
...moreElise Sherman Talks to Herself
Over at The Nervous Breakdown, Elise Sherman explores her literary roots in a self interview that touches on the South, her neo-Faulknerian tendencies, and the difference between New Orleans and the rest of the world.
...more
Rewrite, Reboot, Remix
Rewriting the classics has become a stale and risk-averse strategy. But that shouldn’t spoil the fun of our larger culture of remixing.
...more
The Last Book I Loved: The Way We Weren’t by Jill Talbot
None of us has telepathy, and even the most empathetic of us can’t really experience the world as another person experiences it. So we read essays and memoirs.
...more
The Creative Writing Class That Changed My Life
One could sense this passion in all of us. It seemed to fill the classroom as if it were part of the oxygen.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Christy Crutchfield
Novelist Christy Crutchfield talks about her debut, How to Catch a Coyote, world building, inspiration, icky fiction, the role of mystery, and the marathon of novel writing
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Paul Griner
Paul Griner talks about his newest novel, Second Life, his just-released story collection Hurry Please I Want to Know, putting real life into fiction, and whether creative writing can be taught.
...more
Swinging Modern Sounds #63: It’s Supposed to Be Bad
Rick Moody emails with Scott Timberg, author of the new book Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, about Bob Dylan’s new Sinatra covers album, the need for cultural gatekeepers, and the “slippery sub genre” of bad-on-purpose art.
...moreKeeping Faulkner on a Short Leash
The roguish, hard-drinking novelist is a beloved American archetype, but one the State Department took extra care to control as an international ambassador, according to recently released documents on William Faulkner. Since the author couldn’t be counted on to responsibly manage his own drinking, the US Information Agency put together careful guidelines for a successful […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Steph Cha
Steph Cha talks about her new novel, Beware Beware, writing compelling and complex Korean American characters, and what reading a book has in common with a level in a video game.
...moreBook Club with Grandma
For The Millions, Bryan Vandyke reflects on his relationship with his grandmother and how works by Nabokov and Faulkner allowed for a connection between generations: Reading is solitary and personal, but you aren’t necessarily alone in it. In some ways, we are all reading together; even if we are also reading alone.
...moreSound and the Fury 2.0
Is Lila inspired by The Idiot and The Sounds and The Fury? I’m not sure whether Lila is a stand-in for Christ, but it is clear to me that Robinson has written a character, a new kind of idiot, who is as impressive as Prince Myshkin from The Idiot or Benjy from The Sound and […]
...moreThe Loneliest Art
Does screenwriting qualify as “real” writing? Over at the New Yorker, Richard Brody wonders what F. Scott Fitzgerald’s failed shot at Hollywood reveals about film as an industry and as an art: Fitzgerald was undone by his screenwriting-is-writing mistake. It’s a notion that has its basis in artistic form. Look at Fitzgerald’s books: they are […]
...more