From the Archive: FUNNY WOMEN #139: Gap Year To-Do List
Water is a precious resource; my portable soda stream honors that fact.
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Posts Tagged: kafka
Reality Is Changeable: Talking with Rachel Genn
Rachel Genn discusses her new novel, WHAT YOU COULD HAVE WON.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Ariel Francisco
Ariel Francisco discusses his new poetry collection, A SINKING SHIP IS STILL A SHIP.
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The Lenses We Can’t See: A Conversation with Howard Axelrod
Howard Axelrod discusses his new book, THE STARS IN OUR POCKETS.
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How We Write the Dead: A Conversation with Vikram Paralkar
Vikram Paralkar discusses his debut novel, NIGHT THEATER.
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Traveler in Residence
Then a light turns on and a panic sets in, like noise: unassailable, unnameable.
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Both Ways at Once: Talking with Helen Phillips
Helen Phillips discusses her new novel, THE NEED.
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How to Keep Calm and Carry On
Your mind doesn’t play tricks on you. You play tricks on your mind.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jesse Ball
Jesse Ball discusses his new novel, Census, the inherent sinister nature of institutions, and creating imaginary authors.
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What Appears to Be Fiction: A Conversation with Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss discusses her new novel Forest Dark, provoking questions about reality with her work, and trusting readers to think for themselves.
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An Erasure of Distance: Traveling in Circles with Nathan Englander
Nathan Englander talks about his new novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, the experience of being interviewed, and why he believes books can save lives.
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Words as Events: A Conversation with Jeff Wood
Jeff Wood discusses The Glacier, his genre-bending book combining novel, poetry, screenplay, and collage, how heritage has become a brand, and the American Midwest.
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In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang
Jenny Zhang discusses her story collection Sour Heart, trying to escape the past, collective versus individual responsibility for trauma, and love as imprisonment.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #94: David Burr Gerrard
David Burr Gerrard’s new novel The Epiphany Machine is one of the more ambitious books you’ll read this year, centering on a device that can reveal the epiphany of your life by tattooing the words onto your arm. “ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST” is just one example of the sort of permanent self-owns that get written […]
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #85: Elizabeth Metzger
I have known the poet Elizabeth Metzger since kindergarten—and ever since I have known her, she has been a poet. When we played the The Game of Life, a board game, she wrote small lyrics about the futures we ended the game with; when I had a crush, she wrote light verse about the boys […]
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview #80: Jon Raymond
Jon Raymond is one of Portland’s finest wordsmiths. His writing spans TV, film, short story, novel, art criticism, and a hefty array of magazine work. His new novel, Freebird, is the story of a Californian Jewish family entangled in clashing politics, unspoken histories, and personal dissolve. The Singers are Holocaust survivor Sam, his contemptuous children, […]
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Paul Madonna Moves on to the Next Dream
We are excited to offer a preview of artwork from Paul Madonna’s new book, On to the Next Dream, alongside an interview with our current Comics Editor, Brandon Hicks, and an exclusive excerpt.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Harry Potter reduces prejudice towards immigrants. Why facts don’t change your mind. Kafka (unsurprisingly?) had insomnia. A new clue in the great German crime drama of 1694. Hands-free typing with your brain: now a thing.
...moreLeopard Print
I couldn’t believe there could be a famous book that was so radically unsatisfying. I remember thinking, how can he even be a famous author if he fucks you over this badly? It just seemed like a disaster. At the Atlantic, Jonathan Lethem writes about discovering Franz Kafka as a teenager. Later, Kafka’s ‘leopards’ aphorism would influence […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Max Ritvo
Max Ritvo passed away on August 23, 2016. Earlier this summer, he spoke with Sarah Blake about his debut collection Four Reincarnations, writing with and about cancer, and how language is a game.
...moreStranger Than Fiction
I read the Assistant Warden’s e-mail four or five times, but I still could not grasp its implications. All I could think about was the ten copies of Toni Morrison’s Beloved I had just bought. For Lit Hub, Mikita Brottman details her experience having the book club she ran at the Jessup Correctional Facility be […]
...moreWomen and Workplace Fiction
Over at the New Yorker, Lydia Kiesling writes about workplace fiction, typically seen as a male-centric dominion overseen by writers like Kafka, as written by women from Helen Phillips in The Beautiful Bureaucrat to Terry McMillan in How Stella Got Her Groove Back.
...moreYou Keep Using That Word
I do not think it means what you think it means: Do words mean what the dictionary says they mean, or do they gain meaning through the way we use them? Any person without an agenda knows the answer is “both.”
...moreDrawing a Line
Because borders are so weird, words proliferate. Along with arbitrary, nonsensical violence—and strange, unpredictable exceptions—people talk a lot and lots of papers get filed, even as all of it is, in practice, evacuated of meaning. For The New Inquiry, Aaron Bady thinks through the poetics and the “Kafka-esque” violence of borders. His thoughts culminate in […]
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The Last Book I Loved: The Loss of All Lost Things
I recognize something in the stories… It’s the culture of “I made it” versus the culture of staying behind, the culture of achievement versus the culture of guilt.
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The Rumpus Interview with Bruce Bauman
Bruce Bauman discusses his latest book, Broken Sleep, why rock isn’t dead (yet), how humor makes life bearable, and why we should reinstate the draft.
...moreTranslating Kafka into Japanese
The Berlin-based author Yoko Tawada recently remarked that one of the difficulties she faced when translating Kafka’s short story “Metamorphosis” into Japanese was that the associations Japanese people had with insects—even presumably giant beetles—were different to those of Europeans. In the Japan Times, Damian Flanagan traces the difficulties of translating “insect literature.”
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Paul Lisicky
The Rumpus Book Club talks with Paul Lisicky about his new book The Narrow Door>/em>, how much of your story you own, and the importance of reading your own work aloud.
...moreVisiting Kafka
Over at the New York Times, David Farley writes about Prague and its connections to Kafka, from the 36-foot high Kafka head made of forty-two rotating chrome plates to the various buildings that lay claim to his residence—all the hotspots for the traveling Kafka literati.
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The Rumpus Interview with Laurie Foos
Laurie Foos discusses her latest novel, The Blue Girl, feminism, Michael Jackson, and mythical moon pies.
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