Instantly Gritty: Talking with Jennifer Pashley
Jennifer Pashley discusses her new novel, THE WATCHER.
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Posts Tagged: Gone Girl
The Uncovered Story: A Conversation with Laura Lippman
Laura Lippman discusses her newest novel, LADY IN THE LAKE.
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The Fantasy of the Femme Fatale
I couldn’t help but see these women-led stories as missed opportunities.
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Our Beautiful Fragility: A Conversation with Lisa Locascio
Lisa Locascio discusses her debut novel, OPEN ME.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview #141: Tara Isabella Burton
“I want to make a case for the serious, literary legitimacy of the female experience of self-construction.”
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What to Read When You Want a Fresh Start
In keeping with the spirit of the New Year holiday, we’ve put together a list of books that deal with new beginnings—and the unexpected twists and turns that come after.
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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.
...moreWomen’s Rage
[The Girl on the Train is] also the latest in a long line of texts that channel women’s rage at living under patriarchy. It offers an escapist fantasy, but unlike most fantasies, the escape is not into a more perfect world, just one where women can call bullshit, some more murderously than others, on the […]
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #29: Literary Bitches
All too often, it gets hurled at strong women like a boulder of hate tied up with a big red misogynistic bow.
...moreWish List for More
Alice Gregory and Thomas Mallon request sequels in the New York Times Bookends column. After sifting through some recent, popular marriage novels like Fates and Furies and Gone Girl, Gregory declares her allegiance to Evan S. Connell’s Mrs. Bridge and Mr. Bridge, which, “told in deadpan vignettes, are at once the saddest and funniest books […]
...morePost-Gone Girl Crime Writing
When today’s crime writers are in doubt, they have a woman come through the door with a passive-aggressive zinger on her lips. At the Atlantic, Terrence Rafferty writes about the history crime fiction, from pulp writers in the 20s and 30s through Raymond Chandler to Gillian Flynn, and how women are writing the best crime out […]
...moreBlame Harry Potter for Your Girlfriend Going Gone Girl
The then-girls, now-women who grew up reading Harry Potter are revitalizing the book market and steering publishing trends, and here’s what they want now: crime thriller fiction featuring calculating and vengeful female protagonists, now its own genre umbrella-ed by the term “grip lit.” MPR writes that the dark, psychological magic of Harry Potter inspired this […]
...moreCrime Girls
NPR explores whether and how putting “girl” in the title of your crime novel will garner favorable comparisons to heavy-hitters like Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train—and therefore benefit from an increase in sales: So in a way, the girl insignia is trying to tie it into this larger marketing […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: On Madness and Mad Men
In my eight years as a Mad Men fan, the series has repeatedly prompted me to reflect on parenting.
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The Rumpus Interview with Deborah Reed
Author Deborah Reed discusses her latest novel, Olivay, the necessity of fire, Los Angeles anxiety, and how she found fulfillment at the edge of the American West.
...moreThe Novel Isn’t Dead, It’s Just a Movie
For the Atlantic, Dashiell Bennett explores “the symbiotic relationship between movies and books”: While it’s hardly novel to suggest that Hollywood is out of ideas, 2014 hasn’t done much to prove otherwise. Of the top 10 grossing films released last year, every single one was inspired by a pre-existing media property like a novel, a […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Falling For The Femme Fatale
If power is going to shift toward equality, men have to see power less as an inherent right and more as something we can be incentivized to relinquish.
...moreFlynn and Strayed, Together At Last
Cheryl Strayed and Gillian Flynn discuss ladies and likability in their writing: It never occurred to me, not once, that the book would be read as an inspirational tale. I really have no interest in likability when it comes to characters. It’s always about credibility, and to be credible you have to seem human. One […]
...moreFictional Characters Are Not Your Friends
Critics who fault a character’s unlikability cannot necessarily be faulted. They are merely expressing a wider cultural malaise with all things unpleasant, all things that dare to breach the norm of social acceptability. In a cheekily titled BuzzFeed Books essay, “Not Here to Make Friends,” our essays editor Roxane Gay talks about the knotty issue of […]
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