Become a Rumpus Member
Join NOW!
Married authors Anne Raeff and Lori Ostlund, both winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, discuss their craft, their process, and the way they negotiate the give and take involved in sharing a vocation.
...moreFor Signature, Rita Jacobs reflects on the importance and the role of Anne Frank’s diary, 72 years after it was written. She puts two recent works, Nathan Englander’s short story, “What We Talk About When We Talk about Anne Frank,” and Shalom Auslander’s novel, Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel, into context with Frank’s diary: In a way, […]
...moreWhen I began to write, it was to tell other survivors to write. All we have is words. The Atlantic recounts the extraordinary life and legacy of Elie Wiesel—Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate—in a loving tribute.
...more
Kim Brooks discusses her debut novel, The Houseguest, her approach to character and historical narrative, and the value of engaging readers with larger social issues through literature.
...more
When I told my friend Aharon that my family name used to be Schwartz, he said, “Used to be Schwartz—sounds like a Borscht Belt act.”
...more
[T]he questions pile up, never to be answered.
...more
Poet Kathleen Spivack discusses releasing her debut novel Unspeakable Things at age seventy-seven.
...more
Helen Levinson was fourteen years old in the 1940s when she left Lublin, Poland. I was fifteen years old in 2005 when I arrived.
...moreAlexandra Zapruder writes for Lit Hub on her two decades of work collecting diaries written by teenagers and young adults during the Holocaust, as well as teaching about the wide variety of experiences captured in those diaries.
...more
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
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
Perhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
...moreRecent [WWII] novels by Susanna Moore and Ayelet Waldman achieve their emotional power by focussing upon characters peripheral to the terrible European history that has nonetheless altered their lives. The conflagration must be glimpsed indirectly, following Appelfeld’s admonition that “one does not look directly into the sun.” Such circumspection has not been Martin Amis’s strategy […]
...more
Trailblazing lawyer and professor Morris Ratner speaks to the Rumpus about the historic lawsuits against banks that profited from the Holocaust.
...more
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Monday nights at 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City.
...more
“We live in a moment where images fill our lives in more obvious ways than words. Every day we scroll through Tumblrs, memes and gifs, a parade of images as completely absorbing as it is mind numbing.”
...more
Like most Jewish girls, I read The Diary of Anne Frank at a young age. From the moment I closed the book, the Shoah dominated the mental landscape of my nine-year-old days and commandeered my nights.
...moreIn Andrew Winer’s insightful novel, an art critic struggles with his wife’s infidelity and suicide, and a painter deals with life in Hitler’s concentration camp by creating Jewish marriage contracts.
...moreIn Joshua Cohen’s hyperreal world of kitsch, the Sabbath becomes law, Auschwitz becomes Whateverwitz, and the world’s last Jew is on the run.
...moreIn stories that range through history, serendipity, speculation, whimsy, and horror, Daniel Olivas chronicles the lives of characters who have loved—and lost—Los Angeles.
...more“People should never think that you have to be a very special person to help those who need you.” — Miep Gies, who helped the Frank family during the Holocaust and recovered Anne Frank’s diary. She recently passed away at 100 years old. (via)
...moreWe live in heinous times. Times when it’s nearly impossible to be shocked by the sheer horror to which humans subject each other.
...more