The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #226: Benjamin Nugent
“I’m interested in beautiful events that are wrong.”
...more
Posts Tagged: john cheever
The Rumpus Interview with D. Foy
D. Foy discusses his latest novel, Patricide, the evolution of “gutter opera,” his writing process, free will, and memes.
...moreJohn Cheever Could Never Be a Single Mother
John Cheever, known as the “Chekov of the suburbs” for his fiction’s signature focus on the domestic, suburban family life in the 40s and 50s, probably couldn’t hack being a single mom today. At McSweeney’s, Jeanne Darst shares the excerpts from Cheever’s fiction that pretty much hit this head on the nail.
...moreLearning by Listening
The Millions staff writer Nick Ripatrazone examines literature that “embraces the power of radio” and highlights the sounds of language: Radio is elegiac. Radio is the theater of the mind: our eyes are free to look elsewhere, but the sound bounces in our brains. Two mediums that elicit imagination and subjective experience, radios and literature go well […]
...moreSummer Swimmer’s Lament
Over at The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone dives into John Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” a story with well-deserved fame in the literary community, exemplary of Cheever’s style and a perfect read with which to mourn summer’s end.
...moreRockin’ the Suburbs
The big city may be full of stories, but books like Judy Blume’s Wifey and Karolina Waclawiak‘s The Invaders remind us that the suburbs are equally worth writing about. Over at Electric Literature, Jason Diamond makes the case for settling down.
...more
Cheever House
John Cheever is the quintessential suburban novelist. The New Yorker has the story behind the writer’s Ossining, New York house that inspired many of the stories of middle-class, suburban woe.
...moreFor Sale: John Cheever’s Magical Suburban Home
Alexander Nazaryan’s Newsweek essay about John Cheever’s home (for sale, in Ossining) is more than a real estate ad; it’s a beautiful homage to the suburbanite writer. Upon touring the house with Susan, Cheever’s daughter, Nazaryan writes: I kept asking the one question obviously worth asking—What was it like here?—and she kept wracking her mind and returned […]
...moreNothing New Under the Billboard
With its clean, careful shots and enigmatic plot resolutions, Mad Men tends to inhabit a liminal narrative space, as if the same rules of decorum that govern its romanticized 60s society extend their authority to the show’s refined formal characteristics. This aversion to definitive conclusion is no accident: writing for Salon, Rebecca Makkai examines how […]
...morePop Quiz, Hot Shot
No, really, here’s a fun little quiz from Bookish on trivia about classic short stories. How much do you remember about the tiny details from classic short stories like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”?
...more
The Rumpus Interview with T.C. Boyle
T.C. Boyle, who has now written over twenty books, talks to The Rumpus about his most recent short story collection, four decades of cooking up high-grade literary tales, the importance of performance during readings, and life at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
...more
Rumpus Video Premiere & Interview with Golden Suits
I think the part that gets me most excited is being inspired for a song by something that’s outside of music.
...moreAllan Gurganus on John Cheever
Over at The New York Review of Books, writer Allan Gurganus gives us a peek into his relationship with John Cheever while Gurganus was but a mere student in his twenties, and Cheever was The John Cheever, living in Iowa, without his family, and teaching. In 1973, on my first day at the Iowa Writers’ […]
...moreGrowing Out of It
A descendant of Cheever, Stuart Nadler traces evolving relationships with delicate, precise prose in his debut short story collection, The Book of Life.
...moreTHE LONELY VOICE #12: Cheever in Albania Or The Lonely Voice Hates Travel Writing
There are few things more riveting than watching people gossip in a language you don’t understand.
...moreLarry Fahey: The Last Book I Loved, Bullet Park
I should say at the outset that while Bullet Park is a good book, and in my opinion a great book, it is not a sound book. Cheever is rightly (though myopically) criticized for never having really solved the novel, and most of the five he wrote, including both Bullet Park and even the one […]
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Review Supplement
It’s fall! The air is crisp, the leaves are falling, and I can’t seem to leave my house.
...moreTelevision, Starring John Cheever and John Updike
This has been a week of exhuming dead writers. First the hallelujahs for the news of David Foster Wallace’s forthcoming unfinished novel, now a newly unburied video of Cheever and Updike being interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1981. Deliciously, the thirty-minute interview is posted in its entirety. They talk of religion, The New Yorker, sex, […]
...more