fiction
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Second Twitter Fiction Festival Approaches
Last year, we blogged about the first annual Twitter Fiction Festival after it happened. This year, we’re giving you a heads up: if you want to participate in this year’s festival, happening March 12–16, submit your idea to the organizers here.…
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A Memoirist’s Pact with the Reader
At Salon, Dani Shapiro writes an open response to a reader who felt that Shapiro’s memoir Slow Motion wasn’t fully honest because it didn’t include all the details of her life. In it, she explains what memoir is and isn’t, and what honesty…
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The Iraq War in Fiction
“Fiction is, of course, serving rearguard here; the last decade has seen Iraq War films, poetry collections, documentaries, and non-fiction books too numerous to list, but part of what’s appealing about examining American Iraq War fiction now is that there…
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Holiday Round-up
Two-sentence holiday fiction from Salon is fun and includes many Rumpus folks! You’ll find short fiction by Peter Orner, Matthew Specktor, Cecil Castellucci, Kelly Luce, Elliott Holt, and more! He was never sentimental about these things, being a Jew. Still, Wilshire Boulevard, with…
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For the Love of Short Fiction
The Short Form, a website featuring literary excerpts and reading recommendations, is a true gift to readers and writers of short stories. Sarahana Shrestha and Peter Cavanaugh collaborate to catalogue their favorite reads in contemporary short fiction, and invite guests…
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Fiction or Non fiction: That is the question
Is it true that nowadays nonfiction is more relevant than fiction? Pankaj Mishra and Rivka Galchen answer the question and both their answers are dissimilar. Mishra answers, “Even writers working within the old verities of stability and coherence — we…
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Our Future Depends On Reading!
“Well-meaning adults can easily destroy a child’s love of reading: stop them reading what they enjoy, or give them worthy-but-dull books that you like, the 21st-century equivalents of Victorian “improving” literature. You’ll wind up with a generation convinced that reading…
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Weekly Rumpus Fiction: Bryan VanDyke
The next Weekly Rumpus features fiction from Bryan Van Dyke! Here’s an excerpt! Head down, hands in pockets, I am almost past the first surveillance cameras when I run into my sister. She jumps up and down and squeals with…
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“Every Narrative Voice Is a Fiction”
Some years ago I attended a [Margaret Atwood] reading….She introduced the story she read by saying that it was not autobiographical. Then she read her story about a woman who weighed somewhere in the vicinity of 300 pounds. When she…
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Junot Díaz on the Writing Life
…nothing calls for the paper shredder like a story that the writer clearly hasn’t sat on. A story that hasn’t been rewritten, or rewritten enough. So many writers that I encounter send their work in so soon. It shows, it…
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Weekend Rumpus Roundup
There are no holiday weekends in August, but there are weekend Rumpus roundups. If you feel like you need a hundred-year-nap, you might relate to Saturday’s comic by Yumi Sakugawa. And on Sunday, Rob Roberge wrestled with the way fiction…
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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