The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #193: C.J. Farley
“My novel tries to write the contributions of men and women of color back in.”
...more
Posts Tagged: Kurt Vonnegut
Not All of Us Are on Vacation: Talking with Jason Allen
Jason Allen discusses his debut novel, THE EAST END.
...more
The Sleepwalking American Male
ENOUGH: #MeToo and the Cult of Desirability
A Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary writers that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
...moreAlbum of the Week: Forced Witness by Alex Cameron
“Where does one draw the line when you as a person believe in progress, but as a writer feel like you need to focus on people who would challenge that, who would ask us to regress?”
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #99: Bruce Snow
The summer after Bruce Snow graduated from the University of New Orleans, Hurricane Katrina arrived in his hometown.
...more
He’s All Goat
I stared up at him, at his new muscular legs, his blossoming body, his trunks, his glory, in awe. I waited as long as I could, pretending to turn the two options over in my head, before saying, “Suicide.”
...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 Book Club Chat with Gabrielle Bell
Gabrielle Bell discusses her forthcoming graphic memoir, Everything Is Flammable, what it was like to mine her own life for subject matter, and how anxiety affects her work.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #84: Susan DeFreitas
Picture this: a curbside juggler with a rose between his teeth. That’s the opening image of Susan DeFreitas’s powerful debut novel, Hot Season. Vivid (and sometimes strange) images strike again and again, conjuring ponderosa pines, cafés, old houses, and new characters. The book is firmly set in the fictional town of Crest Top, Arizona, and […]
...more
Down the Rabbit Hole of Experimental Fiction: Michael J. Seidlinger on Becoming a Reader
Michael J. Seidlinger discusses returning to House of Leaves for Ig Publishing’s “Bookmarked” series.
...more
A Recommended Reading List for Trump’s America
We asked nineteen authors what books they’d suggest as recommended reading in light of America’s new political reality.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Terry McDonell
Terry McDonell talks about his new memoir The Accidental Life and his career in the magazine business, which spans the beginning of New Journalism through the digital revolution.
...more
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.
...moreTerm Paper of Champions
At Open Culture, Ayun Halliday introduces Kurt Vonnegut’s final assignment for his Iowa Writer’s Workshop class. Instead of a conventional essay, Vonnegut asks his students to role-play as short story publishers: Proceed next to the hallucination that you are a minor but useful editor on a good literary magazine not connected with a university. Take […]
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #55: Donald Ray Pollock
Donald Ray Pollock has been steadily serving up plates of mild horror since his first book of short stories, Knockemstiff, appeared in 2008. Pollock followed the explosion of Knockemstiff with The Devil All the Time, in 2011, his first novel, which also bordered on the genre of mystery, again with generous servings of darkness. His […]
...moreNovelists Versus Machines
The Atlantic explains how Kurt Vonnegut’s lectures about story arcs influenced a group of researches to classify works of fiction based on six “core narratives” in order to find the “emotional trajectory of a story.” The research group hopes the data helps scientists to “train machines” to write original works.
...moreUnstuck in Time
Despite its uncanny salience in the context of this most recent wave of social injustice and protest, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was written well before the #BlackLivesMatter movement began. Far from a coincidence, the book’s resonance is a product of the same paradox of time it describes, in which dated social conditions cannot possibly continue […]
...moreThe Popular Vote
The Library of Congress recently polled American citizens to find out what books had the most profound effect on them. Among the 17,000-plus survey respondents, popular answers were books like Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King’s The Stand, and The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss. While some literary greats like Toni Morrison did not appear on […]
...moreVonnegut’s Secret Weapon
Without his wife Jane’s faith and encouragement in his writing, it’s highly likely we wouldn’t know Kurt Vonnegut’s name from Adam. The New Yorker explores Jane’s influence on her husband throughout his career as an author. Kurt was more pragmatic, casting about for career ideas—teaching, reporting, opening a library with a bar. Jane had just […]
...moreVonnegut in the House of Magic
Asked years later why he had chosen to write science fiction in his early days, Kurt replied “There was no avoiding it, since the General Electric Company WAS science fiction.” Over at Work in Progress, Ginger Strand shows us how to invent Kurt Vonnegut: add equal parts previous failures in the field, a brother who […]
...more
Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #4: Water, Water, Everywhere
It’s hard to escape news about water these days. Drought on the West Coast, hurricane season raging on the East Coast, and NASA found water on Mars. No matter where you are, these books will drench you.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Song in the Subjunctive
Perhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
...more
Albums of Our Lives: Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm
We could hear the muffled roar of the show booming through the walls of the historic building. We were drunk, pretending to be music writers. We were giddy with our trespass.
...moreRepeating Death
Placed after a mention of death or dying, Kurt Vonnegut’s “So it goes” refrain throughout Slaughterhouse Five utilizes repetition to explore the inevitability of death. Over at the Ploughshares blog, E.V. De Cleyre considers how Kurt Vonnegut uses repetition in relation to death in his writing.
...moreKingdom of the Blind
So it goes. Kurt Vonnegut’s classic novel Cat’s Cradle has been optioned for television, setting the gears in motion for an adaptation of a book Vonnegut himself gave an A+ grade. With such great source material, hopefully the series won’t disappoint.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Robert Repino
Robert Repino talks about his debut novel, Mort(e), the publishing industry, science fiction and literary fiction, writing about religion, and how to write about complex chemical ant languages.
...moreVoting With Champions
A roundtable of authors choose their favorite Vonnegut work for The Oyster Review. Unsurprisingly, Cat’s Cradle came out ahead with a pretty strong hand.
...moreThe Disappointing Grandfather
After hailing Kurt Vonnegut as the “grandfather” on her “literary family tree,” Kathleen Founds describes the experience of reading his short story, “Welcome to the Monkey House,” at BuzzFeed Books. The experience, she writes, was “akin to opening a box in my literary grandfather’s attic and finding something utterly derailing”: If Vonnegut could see through […]
...moreGrieving, Not Grammar
In a little more than two weeks, in a Hospice unit tucked away at the edge of the Atlantic, in Brunswick, North Carolina, a free grief-writing workshop will be held. When Vonnegut urged his students to “write a poem, tear it up,” he stressed the value of art, as such, apart from readership and representation. […]
...more