Brain Soup and Making Things: A Conversation with Rita Bullwinkel
Rita Bullwinkel discusses her debut story collection, Belly Up, the foolishness of writing, and what went into the making of her first book.
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Posts Tagged: george saunders
VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado discusses Her Body and Other Parties, riffing off the work of others, and how writing is like solving a math problem.
...moreNotable NYC: 2/3–2/9
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
...moreAlbum of the Week: Forced Witness by Alex Cameron
“Where does one draw the line when you as a person believe in progress, but as a writer feel like you need to focus on people who would challenge that, who would ask us to regress?”
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Finding Comfort in the Discomfort: Talking with Juan Martinez
Juan Martinez discusses his debut collection Best Worst American, his relationship to the English language, and why Nabokov ruined his writing for years.
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Ambiguity as a Daily Experience: Talking with Jess Arndt
Jess Arndt discusses her debut story collection Large Animals, accepting love from other people, human bodies, and fear of the written word.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #81: Chanelle Benz
Chanelle Benz’s debut collection, The Man Who Shot Out My Eye Is Dead, is filled with characters often facing a moral crossroads. The stories contain the unexpected, like a classic Western complete with local brothel as well as a gothic tale. Benz’s writing has appeared in Electric Literature, Guernica, The American Reader, and Granta.
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What to Read When Things Go Nuclear
Here are some books to read that will remind you that there is beauty out there, even if it’s hard-wrought.
...moreNotable Los Angeles: 2/27–3/5
Monday 2/27: Tim Dorsey discusses and signs Clownfish Blues. 7 p.m. at Book Soup. ALOUD presents An Evening with George Saunders. The author discusses his novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, in conversation with author Anthony Marra. Featuring a dramatic reading by Phil LaMarr. 7:30 p.m. in the Writer’s Guild Theater. The event is full, but […]
...moreNotable Twin Cities: 2/26–3/4
Sunday 2/26: Writer, teacher, and artist Wendy Brown-Baez will read with special guests at the Banfill Locke Center for the Arts. 2 p.m., free. Monday 2/27: Poet Kao Kaila Yang will feature for the Club Book reading series at Rum River Library in Anoka. 7 p.m., free. Tuesday 2/28: The quickest reading in the city, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with George Saunders
George Saunders discusses his new (and first) novel Lincoln in the Bardo, Donald Trump, and a comprehensive theory of literature.
...moreNotable NYC: 2/11–2/17
Saturday 2/11: Immigrant Rally: Here to Stay. Washington Square Park, 2 p.m., free. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi and Jennifer Scappettone join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Sunday 2/12: Nicole Fix, Joanna C. Valente, Fraylie Nord, and Yardenne Greenspan join the Sundays at Erv’s reading series. Erv’s, 6 p.m., free. Peter Burghardt, Sara Wintz, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Jerald Walker
Jerald Walker discusses his memoir, The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult, the story of his childhood in The Worldwide Church of God, and how the act of writing delivered him from bitterness.
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The Rumpus Interview with D. Foy
D. Foy discusses his latest novel, Patricide, the evolution of “gutter opera,” his writing process, free will, and memes.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Maryse Meijer
Maryse Meijer discusses her debut collection Heartbreaker, the importance of tension in writing, revision as a shield against criticism, and life as a twin.
...moreDon’t Let Anyone Tell You They Weren’t Real
The collection both questions and honors a world in which we form emotional bonds to characters who exist for us mostly, or entirely, through various technological projections. Writing for BOMB, David Burr Gerrard explores humanity, reality, and dystopia in Alexander Weinstein’s debut story collection, Children of the New World.
...moreStructure as Lightning Rod
Writing for The Millions, M.C. Mah turns over all the cards in the deck on structure in storytelling. He gathers words of wisdom—and many metaphors—from luminaries like John McPhee, Borges, Vonnegut, and George Saunders, and then links the contemporary “horoscopic style” of structuring to an “anxiety about a better way to tell a story…” possibly […]
...moreTrump Alchemy Examined
“Get more, that inner music seems to be telling him. Get, finally, enough. Refute a lifetime of critics. Create a pile of unprecedented testimonials, attendance receipts, polling numbers, and pundit gasps that will, once and for all, prove—what?” George Saunders patrols the Trump campaign trail and notates the surreal political phenomena known as “The Donald.” Here is what he discovered.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, Guernica has a new story from author and veteran Odie Lindsey, whose debut story collection about soldiers coming home from war, We Come to Our Senses, will be published by W.W. Norton later this month. Included in the collection, “Bird (on back)” picks up in the middle of a disintegrating relationship between an […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Christopher Boucher
Novelist Christopher Boucher talks about writing so-called “experimental” fiction, both embracing and denying the metaphor, and apples.
...moreShort Revolution
Great novels also experiment and innovate, but a short story can make a never-before-seen formal leap and then peace out, before you’re even sure what’s happened. At Electric Literature, Rebecca Schiff introduces us to the authors who have revolutionized the short story in recent years.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Idra Novey
Swati Khurana talks with novelist and translator Idra Novey about the challenges and joys of translation, the idiosyncrasies of language, the inextricable reception of women’s writing and women’s bodies, and much more.
...moreKind, and Very Funny
For TriQuarterly, Cara Suglich interviews George Saunders, nationally-recognized literary great and funny person. Saunders shares his methods, his insights on what makes stories work, and some fantastic jokes.
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The Rumpus Interview with Joanna Walsh
Joanna Walsh discusses her story collection, Vertigo, consciousness, artifice, and simultaneity.
...moreSaunders and Storytelling
Brevity’s nonfiction blog takes a look at a recent short film about writer George Saunders’s thoughts on storytelling, and applies his advice to essay and memoir: With nonfiction, looking underneath is often less interrogating our imagination and more out-there-with-a-recorder research. It can be challenging to change our own minds, especially about an experience or situation […]
...moreGeorge Saunders and Donald Trump
George Saunders! America’s greatest satirist! The heir to Mark Twain’s estate! And I thought, Oh, what I wouldn’t give to hear Saunders weigh in on Trump. And then I remembered that, in a way, he already had. At the Kenyon Review blog, Cody Walker talks about how George Saunders‘s story “The Red Bow” can be […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Annie Liontas
Annie Liontas talks about her debut novel Let Me Explain You, crafting voices, and the benefits—and occasional pitfalls—of returning to get an MFA after years of writing in the dark.
...moreAndroidish Spy Paraphernalia
The New York Times brought together two distinctly imaginative authors, George Saunders and Jennifer Egan, for a chat on writing the future, their famously fabulist impulses, and the core of why we turn to literature at all.
...moreOh, Crap, I Still Have to Write a Book
Over at the New Yorker, George Saunders maps out his writing education, from Tobias Wolff’s call to his parents’ house to tell him about his acceptance to the Syracuse Creative Writing Program, Doug Unger’s continual excitement and teaching, the loss of “the magic,” finding the magic again, and a six year gap spent as a […]
...moreIf Writers Were Baseball Players
With giddiness over the National League Championship, Lit Hub imagines the amusing fantasy lineup of players if the baseball teams were made up entirely of writers. Pitting Jennifer Egan and George Saunders against Malcolm Gladwell and Alice Munro, the list is an entertaining interpretation of writers’ styles translating into athletic skill.
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