Expunging the Bogeyman: Sady Doyle’s Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers
The root of these imagined, monstrous versions of women, Doyle argues, is fear.
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Posts Tagged: Frankenstein
Driven from the Village with Pitchforks
“Monster” is a good name for anything you want to destroy.
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Both Ways at Once: Talking with Helen Phillips
Helen Phillips discusses her new novel, THE NEED.
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What to Read When You’re Writing Your Truth
Tracy Strauss shares a reading list to celebrate her debut book, I JUST HAVEN’T MET YOU YET.
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What to Read When You’re Afraid of Growing Up
Kendra Allen shares a reading list to celebrate her debut essay collection, WHEN YOU LEARN THE ALPHABET.
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Sophia Hanson Wants to Believe
Don’t try to make human what you are not willing to regard as human.
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The Rumpus 2017 Holiday Gift Guide
We’ve gathered up our favorite gifting ideas this holiday season and put them together into one handy list!
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It’s Never Too Late to Be Found: A Conversation with Rene Denfeld
Rene Denfeld discusses her latest book, The Child Finder, the ways in which trauma traps us, and the important role of imagination in finding resilience and escape.
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Why Is It Always up to the Women?
That’s the real tangle of women’s labor; it’s too deeply ingrained to the way our lives work for us to properly strike from it.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #72: Laurie Sheck
Laurie Sheck is the author, most recently, of Island of the Mad, and A Monster’s Notes, a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for The Willow Grove, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the […]
...moreCarving the Uncanny Valley
Any Luddite with half a brain has already begun stockpiling nonperishables for the inevitable moment the robots rise up against us. Over at the Ploughshares blog, Joelle Renstrom recounts how writers were awakened to the threat of artificial intelligence: A certain likeness to humans inspires kinship, but when the line blurs, that kinship turns to […]
...moreEndued with Vital Warmth
Over at The New Republic, Francine Prose writes about Frankenstein’s conception, as a bet in a drama-fueled writer’s group, as fueled by a young soon-to-be-mother’s anxiety, as a cleverly-plotted Gothic novel, as stories embedded in stories, as something altogether wonderful and shot through with dark.
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The Rumpus Interview with Laura Mullen
Acclaimed poet and writer Laura Mullen talks about her new book, Complicated Grief, obsession, germ theory, and exposing the arbitrary and superficial protections that have failed us.
...moreOld Books for Cold Weather
Lit Hub has been sharing excerpts of classic favorites to help weather the brutal cold—or, well, the mild cold, as is the case here in New York. Cozy up with the quiet desperation and harsh weather of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Guy de Maupassant’s “The First Snowfall.”
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All Those Stars
Twenty-one years ago my mother stopped her dialysis treatments before they’d barely begun, a decision that prematurely ended her life.
...moreBetween Living and Dying
At the Public Domain Review, Sharon Ruston examines contemporary influences on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, specifically with regards to scientific developments in discovering the line between life and death.
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The Saturday Rumpus Review of Ex Machina
Ex Machina is pretty adept at tricking viewers into thinking we’re smarter than the film.
...moreFeminism in the Family
The Wall Street Journal interviews biographer Charlotte Gordon about Mary Shelley’s relationship with her mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, and how her mother’s feminism permeated the future Frankenstein author’s entire life.
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His Greatest Masterpiece
The banality of evil hides in people, and who they unleash it upon become forever tainted by their names. They become one. Creator and monster. Evil by association.
...moreGhost Stories with Neil Gaiman
Vulture spent time with Neil Gaiman perusing the special collections of the New York Public Library, which includes early drafts of Frankenstein, engravings from William Blake, and Jack Kerouac’s blood stains.
...moreLord Byron was the Original Vampire
On the same night that Mary Shelley released Frankenstein’s monster, John Polidori, Lord Byron’s personal physician, wrote “The Vampyre,” the first fully realized English vampire story. The Public Domain Review takes a look at how Byron served as the model for the first known aristocratic bloodsucker.
...moreFrankenstein’s Legacy
For the Guardian, Neil Gaiman discusses the import of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, suggesting that the book arrived and redefined gothic fiction at a culturally apt moment: Ideas happen when the time is right for them. The ground had been prepared. Gothic fiction had been all the rage for some time: dark, driven men had wandered the corridors of their ancestral […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Casa Azul Cripple
“I wanted to be sexual/sexualized, but not fetishized. But was becoming someone’s fetish the only way? How was being fetishized different than being desired for having a unique, unrepeatable shape…or would the one leg always and forever be the only thing that mattered?”
...moreFrankenstein, The Tree with Forty Fruit
Miraculous, and not a flaming sword near it—Sam Van Aken’s project marries sculpture and agriculture and genetics and a little bit of wonder. I was able to see the grafting process while growing up on a farm and have always been fascinated by how one living thing cut could be cut inserted into another living […]
...moreThe Science of Creativity
For the Atlantic, Cody C. Delistrarty ponders whether a person can learn to be creative, or if he or she is simply born with the trait. Framing his essay on Mary Shelley and her writing process for Frankenstein, Delistrarty presents several prevailing theories, among them that an “openness to experience” is often crucial for an artist’s […]
...moreMary Shelley’s Correspondence Discovered!
Nora Crook, in perhaps the most exciting click ever to happen on the internet, made the discovery of a lifetime when she came across previously unpublished correspondence from the late Frankenstein author Mary Shelley. The article at The Guardian describes several letters written by Shelley shortly before her death. “Perhaps most touching is her pride […]
...moreFrankenstein’s Conception
“Shelley has long been doubted for her version of events that led to the writing of one of the most beloved Gothic tales in the English language: That she wrote it on a challenge one night in June 1816 during a “waking dream” as the moon shone through her window.” Detractors of Mary Shelley’s account […]
...moreA FAN’S NOTES, The Rumpus Sports Column #35: The Monster and Carmelo Anthony
Thanks to the most anticipated trade of this year’s NBA season, Carmelo Anthony (“Melo” for short) has left behind the soothing powder blue uniform of the Denver Nuggets and switched to the orange-and-royal-blue hues of the New York Knicks.
...moreMonster Mashup
To continue on the subject of monsters and mashes for a moment: Last Sunday in the Los Angeles Times, Ed Park published his notes on Laurie Sheck’s A Monster’s Notes, which is a novel narrated by none other than Frankenstein’s monster, who is alive and well (um, make that undead and well) in New York […]
...moreResearch for Storytellers
Two recent novels bend history to the will of their authors.
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