historical fiction
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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.
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History 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,…
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Cuba’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…
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Imagining 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…
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The 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…
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Forgotten 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…
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Life 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…
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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.
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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.
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The 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…
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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.
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Writing 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…