A Beautiful Silver Screen: Amanda Lee Koe’s Delayed Rays of a Star
[W]hat lies beneath the arcing paths of these stars, fueling and frustrating them?
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Posts Tagged: historical fiction
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #195: Curdella Forbes
“I wanted the thing to feel as ordinary as bread.”
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Trisha Low
Trisha Low discusses her new book-length essay, SOCIALIST REALISM.
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The Itch to Write: Talking with Courtney Maum
Courtney Maum discusses her new novel, COSTALEGRE.
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What We Inherit: Talking with Chanelle Benz
Chanelle Benz discusses her debut novel, THE GONE DEAD.
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The Invisible Story Beneath the Story: A Conversation with Catherine Chung
Catherine Chung discusses her second novel, THE TENTH MUSE.
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Four Continents, Three Families, One Nation: Talking with Namwali Serpell
Namwali Serpell discusses her debut novel, THE OLD DRIFT.
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Beyond the Elegant Veneer: Talking with Greer Macallister
Greer Macallister discusses her new novel, WOMAN 99.
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The World of the Book: Talking with Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken discusses her new novel, BOWLAWAY.
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A Badass Just Because: Talking with Steph Post
Steph Post discusses her new novel, MIRACULUM.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Tom Barbash
Tom Barbash discusses THE DAKOTA WINTERS.
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Something Truer Than True: Talking with Kelly O’Connor McNees
Kelly O’Connor McNees discusses her new novel, Undiscovered Country, the timeliness of its story, and the genre of historical fiction.
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These Places Surround Me: Talking with Quintan Ana Wikswo
Quintan Ana Wikswo discusses her novel, A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be, delving into the facets of trauma, and her creative processes.
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Moments of Truth and Beauty: A Conversation with David Rocklin
David Rocklin discusses The Night Language, the larger landscape of appropriation and empathy, immigration and power structures, and intimacy and representation.
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A Need for a Home: Lucy Hughes-Hallett Discusses Peculiar Ground
Lucy Hughes-Hallett discusses her debut novel, Peculiar Ground, out today from HarperCollins.
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At the Mercy of the Mob: Theodore Wheeler’s Kings of Broken Things
[J]ust as bad nonfiction can be written to tell a lie, good fiction can be written to tell the truth.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Brooke C. Obie
Brooke C. Obie discusses the historical basis for her debut novel, Book of Addis, writing to dismantle white supremacy, and why Black speculative fiction is integral to her survival.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #96: Donna Baier Stein
Colorado’s Baby Doe Tabor was a bad ass. Born in 1854, ‘Lizzie,’ as she was known, bucked social norms of her day. In an era when silver miners believed it bad luck to even speak to a woman before descending into the mines, Lizzie worked alongside her male counterparts in the damp, dark underground caverns. […]
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The Human Cost: Discussing Political Storytelling with Olivia Kate Cerrone
Olivia Kate Cerrone discusses her novella The Hunger Saint and the significance of historical fiction.
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Every Woman Is a Nation unto Herself: A Conversation with Sabina Murray
Sabina Murray discusses the novel Valiant Gentleman, writing characters that are fundamentally different from herself, and confronting issues of colonization.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #86: Max Allan Collins
In April, the Mystery Writers of America named Max Allan Collins a Grand Master, the organization’s peer-voted lifetime achievement award. Collins has had a prolific and often eclectic career. The Iowa Writers Workshop graduate has written more than one hundred books, has had a long career as a comics writer including, most famously, the Road to […]
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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.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Lucy Jane Bledsoe discusses her latest book, A Thin Bright Line, uncovering the remarkable story of her aunt, and illuminating history through the lens of imagination.
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An Ultimate Illustrated Fantasy Guide of Gilmore Girls Mashups
HOW AWESOME WOULD THESE MASHUPS BE? Oh well. Maybe next year.
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The Big Idea: Dawn Tripp
Dawn Tripp discusses Georgia, her new novel based on Georgia O’Keeffe’s life, O’Keeffe’s distancing herself from feminism, and balancing biography with fiction.
...moreSex, Money, and Art Forgery
“Novels about psychically and sexually burdened paintings have a rich literary pedigree,” writes UNC Professor of Art History Maggie Cao for Public Books. Cao’s essay tackles the subject of forgery, which puts “the intimate, almost magical role that works of art play in people’s emotional and erotic lives” into conversation with modern market forces that have, as […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Rachel Hall
Rachel Hall discusses her debut collection Heirlooms, her mother’s experience growing up in a French Jewish family during World War II, and crossing genre borders in her writing.
...moreHistory as Structure
In a Q & A with debut novelist Yaa Gyasi on the ZYZZYVA blog, Ismail Muhammad asks Gyasi to expound on narrative structure and the far-reaching effects of the international slave trade: I realized that I was interested in tracking how slavery, colonialism, and institutionalized racism work over a very long period of time—not just the beginning and […]
...moreCuba’s Unfinished Race Revolution
I want readers to understand how racism and antiracism can exist at the same time even in a revolutionary setting. Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution by author and professor Devyn Benson is the long-untold history of racism against Black Cubans. The San Francisco Bay View interviewed Benson about the recent publication of her book, […]
...moreImagining the Past
Over at the New Yorker, Lucy Ives writes about how some recent works of fiction challenge conventional definitions of historical fiction by “offer[ing] a past of competing perspectives, of multiple voices.” Citing works by Danielle Dutton, Marlon James, and John Keene, Ives notes: These fictions do not focus on fact but on fact’s record, the […]
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