Intimate Characters: Talking with Laura Bogart
Laura Bogart discusses her debut novel, DON’T YOU KNOW I LOVE YOU.
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Posts Tagged: Girls
Playing Whack-a-Mole: Talking with Leslie Pietrzyk
Leslie Pietrzyk discusses her new novel, Silver Girl, writing a nonlinear narrative, and depicting female friendships in new ways.
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Understanding the Language of Female Breakups
Female friendship, however necessary it is in our lives, and for all the joy it brings us, for all its love and support and kindness and generosity, can be a real mindf***k when it ends.
...more#SuicideGirls: Why I Teach Sylvia Plath
But let’s not forget: feminism is, at least in part, about choice, and portions of life are play, not politics. Play and relationships and creativity and whatever we want.
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Sound & Vision: Leah Hennessey
Allyson McCabe talks with Leah Hennessey, a co-creator of the DIY web series Zhe Zhe, about the art of performance in the age of Trump.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Samantha Irby
Samantha Irby discusses her new essay collection, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, all that comes along with writing about your life, and reading great horror books.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Amazon’s revolutionary new way to sell books in a physical brick and mortar store, has opened in New York City. Everyone old is new again. Even chain bookstores, like the UK’s Waterstones, thrives because of booksellers’ personal touches, like book recommendations.
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An Ultimate Illustrated Fantasy Guide of Gilmore Girls Mashups
HOW AWESOME WOULD THESE MASHUPS BE? Oh well. Maybe next year.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Abigail Ulman
Abigail Ulman talks about her debut collection Hot Little Hands, the limitations of the cultural narrative, her paralyzing pre-publication fears, and why she loves adolescent narrators.
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #24: Pussy Riot
This column has been on hiatus since the springtime and I’m happy to be back. I’ve been reading so much—mostly books by women—this summer. While I’ve been away, I’ve been thinking about gender more than ever, if you can believe that. I’ve also been hanging out with some younger women, observing their strengths, and appreciating […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Sara Benincasa
Comedian Sara Benincasa opens up about her latest book Real Artists Have Day Jobs, adjusting to success, Venn-diagramming love, and the loss of Morley Safer.
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Translating the Elderly: Amour, The Intern, and Our Many Selves
The elderly become reminders not of our imminent mortality, but of our ever-evolving humanity, our enduring lust—and need—for connection and purpose.
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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?
...moreBad Press
Though Chloe Caldwell’s books, including her 2015 novella Women, have been praised by the likes of Lena Dunham and Cheryl Strayed, there are some critics who were not quite so enthralled. How did Caldwell handle the bad press? And how bad was it? “I am so fucking bored of reading essays about being young and confused, […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tania James
Tania James discusses her most recent novel, The Tusk That Did the Damage, the challenges of writing an elephant narrator, and the moment when she knew she could be a writer.
...moreThe Singular They
For the New York Times, Amanda Hess gives us a brief history of the increasingly prominent and ambiguously-gendered singular they, from usage in Shakespeare to Girls and The Argonauts.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A bookstore owner in Maine has collected a huge payday after a rare stamp sold for close to $60,000. One of the missing Hong Kong booksellers was a British citizen, and now Britain is saying this citizen was involuntarily removed to the mainland. A California bookstore is helping single book lovers find each other by selling […]
...moreMapplethorpe Biopic Stars Announced
The Mapplethorpe Foundation is backing a biopic on the photographer’s life, and Pitchfork reports that film’s stars have been cast: Doctor Who’s Matt Smith will be playing Robert Mapplethorpe, and Zosia Mamet of Girls will be playing Patti Smith. Like Smith’s Just Kids, the film will explore the relationship between the two artists and the […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: In Defense of Not Cooking
Should there be a Bechdel test for women in the kitchen?
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The Last Book I Loved: Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York
But when my loneliness feels as vast—and capable of drowning me—as the sea, this book about self-destruction comforts me more than any self-help.
...moreThis Week in Posivibes: Will Ivy
Will Ivy’s first solo 7” came out on Pretty Penny this weekend, with a release show at LA’s HM157. Most recently of Dream Boys, Ivy has played in a number of great SF groups, including Girls and Hunx and His Punx. Scrap Plastic b/w If I Was A Painter is a great debut of solo material, […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Across the Divide
The proof of their friendship came through years of devotion.
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This Week in Short Fiction
On Tuesday, Margaret Atwood released Stone Mattress, a collection of “wonderfully weird short stories.” Stone Mattress is Atwood’s eighth collection of stories, not to mention her 14 novels and other formidable volumes of poetry, children’s literature, and nonfiction. Reviewers across the boards are heralding this most recent work as “wise, sharp,” and “rich.” Let’s look at […]
...moreHonest to a Fault
You probably knew that Lena Dunham wrote a memoir (if you didn’t, she has), but she’d love to remind you why she’s qualified. Meghan Daum elaborates for the New York Times Magazine: To suggest that Dunham is too young, too privileged, too entitled, too narcissistic, neurotic and provincial (in that rarefied Manhattan-raised way) to be dispensing advice to […]
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The Rumpus Review of Obvious Child
Obvious Child is sweetness, swaddled in a dirty joke. It’s the delicate pastel world of Wes Anderson, where characters are imperfect but want to get better. Where every asshole, in the end, has a really big heart.
...moreDear Sugar Sparks A Tiny Revolution
In the face of rampant negative body image and self-esteem issues, New York City is launching a campaign to help girls declare, “I’m beautiful the way I am.” Samantha Levine, the Bloomberg aide behind the campaign, cites one of Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar columns as an inspiration: “I think being a woman in this society, […]
...moreThoughts on Gender from A “Manic Depressive Nightmare Girl”
Girls rule, etcetera. But men are not afraid of girls. Girls never did and don’t now “run the world,” and if we believe Bey when she sings so, it’s only because she’s a woman. For Vice, Sarah Nicole Prickett writes a provocative piece about the value of being a bitch in a world where women often […]
...more“The Profundity of Female Friendships”
At The New Yorker, Anna Holmes writes about how “Girls” and Sheila Heti’s new novel How Should a Person Be? “treat heterosexual coupling as secondary, and how they depict the profundity of female friendships, not to mention their real perils—which are quite different from the competitive jockeying that is so often imagined.” Holmes proposes that these texts may […]
...moreThe Rumpus Saturday Essay: Me Be Pretty One Day
When I was younger and lonelier and knew more about other people than I did about myself, I thought
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