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.
...more
Posts Tagged: historical fiction
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.
...more
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.
...more
A Need for a Home: Lucy Hughes-Hallett Discusses Peculiar Ground
Lucy Hughes-Hallett discusses her debut novel, Peculiar Ground, out today from HarperCollins.
...more
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.
...more
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.
...more
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. […]
...more
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.
...more
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.
...more
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 […]
...more
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.
...more
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.
...more
An Ultimate Illustrated Fantasy Guide of Gilmore Girls Mashups
HOW AWESOME WOULD THESE MASHUPS BE? Oh well. Maybe next year.
...more
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 […]
...more
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 […]
...moreThe Lives of Others
We’ve always been fascinated by the possibility of understanding the person behind the work. For Lit Hub, Heller McAlpin examines a long tradition of writing about writers: There’s a special frisson of pleasure in reading about writers’ early struggles when you know what the future holds for them—which in the case of most of these […]
...moreForgotten Females
Jillian Cantor explains what drew her to the women in history, Margot Frank and Ethel Rosenberg, that she wrote her two novels on. Cantor is intrigued by women in history whose stories are lost or forgotten, and uses her writing to tell their stories: …I began to think about what it might’ve been like to […]
...moreLife in the Historical Novel
The historical novel describes then what might have happened within what happened; the feeling of being free within the machine of one’s fate, dare I even say the old consciousness. For The New Republic, Alexander Chee explores historical fiction and whether the genre owes more to literature or historical accuracy. For more from Chee on […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee talks about opera, the Wild West, and the charismatic women of 19th-century France that inspired his new novel The Queen of the Night.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Danielle Dutton
Danielle Dutton discusses her forthcoming novel Margaret the First, the research behind writing historical fiction, and how being the editor of a small press has influenced her own work.
...moreThe Queen(s) of Fiction
I write historical fiction. Some consider this an outré craft. If literary fiction is Brooklyn, the historical novel is Queens. Over at the New York Times’s Sunday Book Review, Geraldine Brooks pens an essay on her experience recapturing the consciousness of people who lived more than 3,000 years ago through historical fiction.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Susan Barker
Susan Barker discusses her third novel, The Incarnations, writing dialogue in a second language, the Opium Wars and Chinese history, and the years of research that went into her book.
...moreWriting Through History
Ottessa Moshfegh views the past as a sort of fiction—she didn’t live it, so in a way, it is fiction to her. This view informs both her novels, which are full of deeply flawed characters and rich details. But writing Eileen, set in 1960s New England, was fraught for the author: I had to deal […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Brian Shawver
Author Brian Shawver talks about his new book, Danger on the Page, his novel Aftermath, MFA programs, and why it’s a good thing that writing never stops being hard work.
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Steve Stern
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Steve Stern about his new novel The Pinch, about what it means for Jews to be “people of the book,” and how fiction and history can be entwined in entertaining and challenging ways.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr and Janis Cooke Newman
Authors Joshua Mohr and Janis Cooke Newman talk with one another about their new novels, All This Life and A Master Plan for Rescue, respectively.
...more