What to Read When You’re a PEN Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize Winner
The PEN 2018 Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize winners share books that have inspired them!
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Posts Tagged: Helen Oyeyemi
VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Renee Simms
Renee Simms discusses her debut collection, Meet Behind Mars, leaving law to become a writer, and writing through major life changes.
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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.
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What to Read When You Want to Curl Up with a Good Book
Rumpus editors share their favorite winter reads.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado discusses her debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, her favorite horror writers and movies, and writing the book(s) she’s always wanted to read.
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What If We Were Allowed to Do Anything We Wanted?: A Conversation with Clare Beams
Clare Beams on We Show What We Have Learned and the “living strangeness” of short fiction.
...moreBorn of a Limitless Imagination
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ilana Teitelbaum writes a glowing review of Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours, praising Oyeyemi’s singular voice. Teitelbaum writes: “The dazzle of Oyeyemi’s technique fully engages the reader’s mind; the heart is undisturbed. … Oyeyemi’s infinitely nested stories seem an end […]
...moreRooted Elsewhere
Most of the rest of the stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked, with major characters in one story later turning up as minor characters in another. This loose, multiracial, polymorphously perverse, generation-spanning cast lives mostly in present-day England, but they have roots elsewhere. Anton grew up in “a country that’s not even sure […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Manuel Gonzales
Manuel Gonzales talks about his new novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack!, transitioning from nonprofit work to teaching, and how to zig when a trope wants you to zag.
...moreOyeyemi’s Luminous Universe
Author Laura van den Berg has glowing words about Helen Oyeyemi’s short story collection, What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours. In her New York Times book review, van den Berg writes: “A collection is, by my lights, a chance to build a universe, an overarching ecosystem… Oyeyemi has created a universe that dazzles and […]
...moreAll About Eva
She’s black, but not local, this new colleague who wears her boots and jeans and scarf with a bohemian aplomb that causes the others to ask her where she shops. “Oh, you know, thrift stores,” she says with a chuckle. George at the desk next to yours says “Charity shops?” and the newcomer says “Yeah, […]
...moreA Crucial Conversation with the Self
For a black woman in a white world, a conversation with the self is crucial: for when she walks through that often-unwelcoming world she is subjected to confining perceptions of who she might be. When that world insists on racist and narrow paradigms, the diary gives these women a chance to scratch out and rewrite […]
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Rewrite, Reboot, Remix
Rewriting the classics has become a stale and risk-averse strategy. But that shouldn’t spoil the fun of our larger culture of remixing.
...moreAll the Shades of Black and White
Writing for The New Inquiry, Hannah Black explores race in Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy, Snow, Bird and the relationship of white, black, and mixed racial identities in modern western culture. Similarly, race-authenticity does not spring up from the mere fact of certain physical features—it has to be mined from others. Mixed-race identities are fissured only in […]
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Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi
Anita Felicelli reviews BOY, SNOW, BIRD by Helen Oyeyemi today in The Rumpus Book Reviews.
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