Concubines and Expat Husbands: Catching Up with Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan discusses her new novel, Sarong Party Girls, concubine culture, and the freedom of writing fiction after a career in journalism.
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Posts Tagged: friendship
A List of Concerns
I’m not sure how it happened, but I’ve ventured beyond what I came to see. The end of the road, the limitless sky—I still haven’t found our prairie.
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Learning to Live Alone through the Legacy of Mary Tyler Moore
Characters like Mary and Rhoda hadn’t been turned into stereotypes of single women in their thirties or career women or divorcees. They couldn’t be: they were the first.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Maybe There’s This Dragon?
Maybe I’ve been here too long. Maybe I’ve finally accepted that the apartment is somehow aspirational. Maybe there’s this dragon.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Angela Palm
Putting experience into words gives them less power over me, I think.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #67: Anuradha Roy
A tranquil beach town named Jarmuli is the setting of Anuradha Roy’s third novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and made the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Four older women travel as friends in search of a bucolic vacation, and a young woman, contending with the […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Kerry and Tyler Cohen
Sisters and collaborators Kerry and Tyler Cohen talk about their new book Girl Trouble: An Illustrated Memoir, female friendships, and some of the challenges of writing memoir.
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The Last Book I Loved: So Long, See You Tomorrow
By drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives.
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Voices on Addiction: The Only Thing That Has to Change Is Everything
The word rehab is short for rehabilitate, which means to restore to a former capacity. Like houses, I remember thinking. Demo the kitchen. Tear down the walls.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jacqueline Woodson
Jacqueline Woodson discusses her latest novel Another Brooklyn, the little deaths of lost friendships, and her work with children across the country as the Poetry Foundation’s Young People’s Poet Laureate.
...moreIn Sickness and Friendship and Jane Austen
Long before Curtis Sittenfeld was a New York Times bestselling author (Eligible), she was friends with Sam Park (This Burns My Heart). And they’re still friends: in an essay for the New Yorker, Sittenfeld chronicles their decades-long platonic romance, from early days collaborating on “50 Most Beautiful Sexiest Men Alive of the Year at Stanford” to dedicating their […]
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Voices on Addiction: The Ghost Inside
But was I an alcoholic? The idea had never crossed my mind. The more I reflected on it, the less I understood.
...moreThe Lyrics of Friendship
What is friendship if not learning the song of another’s heart and singing it back to them? In a reflection on friendship and language, Brain Pickings’s Maria Popova explores Eudora Welty’s writings on the topic. Popova writes: “[I]t might be the basic necessities of friendship, [Welty] suggests, that sparked in us the evolutionary need for […]
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The Mortgage Arrangement
It’s true that real estate can’t save a marriage. But it might be equally true that it can save a relationship.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Nabokov’s epilepsy, heart problems, and unpublished letters. A dictionary for the fleshy bits of brain that store our words. Ephemerality meets Instagram. The secret sauce behind NBC’s Olympics telecast. Your designated BFF might not even know your name.
...moreFriendless Female Sex Workers
Not only are these characters destined to die in the cautionary tales and to endure marriages to self-congratulatory men in the redemptions tales, they don’t even have anyone to miss them when they succumb to these fates At Hazlitt, Alana Massey writes about the baseless trope in films of the depraved and friendless female sex […]
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Monkey Men
Still lying on the bed in the Wausau hotel room, I started counting ceiling tiles. From above the covers. Not under. Never under. I always feel constricted, under.
...moreWeekly Geekery
If you give a mouse an Orson Welles film, he might solve human consciousness. Your great-great grandkids might text from the grave. What Westerners consider universal about music: totally incorrect. Yes, you can be high on friendship (and it’s a painkiller!). Alas, poor Turing: a rock could pass his test.
...moreUntil Death
There’s a piece of writing advice that tritely insists that great pain makes for great writing. In reality, it often takes years to find the words for a painful event, and even then there is the nagging insufficiency of words and the threat of ego that comes with writing one’s own pain. For BuzzFeed Books, […]
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The Rumpus Review of The Narrow Door by Paul Lisicky
If we’re honest with ourselves, the great loves of our lives are often platonic.
...moreTurkish Delight
TI say we are not together. I say that we are not together, but I see him everywhere. He spent a summer here, summers and summers ago, and I booked my ticket to get closer to him and I booked my ticket to get away from him. He said they love Iranians in Turkey. They’ll […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Unrecognized Brownie, Circa 1978
I picture families lingering over albums in the faraway future, someone leaning over someone else’s shoulder, pointing at me, asking, Who was that?
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Miracle and Magic
Check out Deborah Treisman in lively conversation with Lara Vapnyar on the “miracle of a New York City adventure,” the bewitching, wish-granting power of Leonard Cohen’s songs, and Russian immigrants. Vapnyar’s forthcoming novel, Still Here, explores Russian culture in the US, friendship, and eternal life on the Internet.
...moreNo New Friends
A connection so fundamentally optional doesn’t provide the same ambivalence and tension you get with alcoholic parents, narcissistic spouses, or resentful bosses. If your friend abuses you or your trust, you can just walk away. Slate’s Laura Miller explains why nobody writes memoirs about their friends, and then looks at two recent books that take […]
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I Hear the Place That Can’t Be Named
It is remembering and loving anyway—not forgetting—that binds us even if the recollections are absurd, undignified, cruel, or humiliating.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: An Ocean of Hatted Absurdity
I wonder if in absence I will now come to conflate him with the character I’ve drawn. Or with the character I’m drawing now.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Paul Lisicky
The Rumpus Book Club talks with Paul Lisicky about his new book The Narrow Door>/em>, how much of your story you own, and the importance of reading your own work aloud.
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The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Gabbert
Author Elisa Gabbert talks about her books, The Self Unstable and The French Exit, diversity, publishing, whiteness, and writing in the Internet Age.
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