Rumpus Original Fiction: Sentences
” . . . I’m pretending to be a student for the sake of a thought experiment I’m trying to disguise as a story so it has a better chance of getting read. Also, I look young.”
...more
Posts Tagged: metafiction
Down the Rabbit Hole: Eugene Lim’s Search History
Lim has written before about experimental fiction and the need to slough off such conventions of narrative as plot.
...more
An Elaborately Constructed Artifice: Maxwell’s Demon by Steven Hall
Slipstream may as well be what we call our bewilderment.
...more
On Saviors and Superheroes: A Conversation with Adam Nemett
Adam Nemett discusses his debut novel, WE CAN SAVE US ALL.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #93: Barbara Browning
When I requested an interview from Barbara Browning to talk about her new novel, The Gift, she agreed and asked if I had a favorite song she could cover for me on the ukulele. Browning possesses many gifts—she is an accomplished dancer, novelist, performance artist, theorist, teacher, and self-described amateur musician—and The Gift is a […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Kristopher Jansma
Kristopher Jansma discusses his second novel, Why We Came to the City, facing adulthood in his thirties, and working through grief and loss in writing.
...moreThe Greatest Experimentalist You’ve Never Heard Of
She felt that this approach illuminated a fundamental truth about language: The very act of using language, she once told an interviewer, involves a ‘castration. The moment we utter a sentence, we’re leaving out a lot.’ A “nanopress” has begun reissuing the work of novelist, poet, and essayist Christine Brooke-Rose, who died in 2012. The author […]
...moreLearning to Love
Maybe the best reading leads us to struggle with ourselves. Jennifer Audette writes about the messiness of learning to love the metafiction of Ben Lerner for the Fiction Writer’s Review: But then again, why do I need the narrator to experience wonder and emotions the way I think he should, the way I want him […]
...moreReading Between the Lines
Here is what I mean by meta-fiction: all these books, stories, and bodies of work contain made-up books and bodies of work. Some are based on real books. Some are making fun of real books, a little bit, gently. Some are invented entirely. And one, you can go out and buy. Hint: it’s not Don […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Sean Michaels
The Rumpus talks to Sean Michaels about his new book, Us Conductors, challenging a reader’s empathy, and a true, strange musical instrument: the theremin.
...moreThe Private Lives of Trees
The second novella by Chilean writer Alejandro Zambra, one of the “Bogotá 39” influential Latin American writers, uses metafiction to tell a delicate, emotionally complex story.
...moreFrom Old Notebooks
“As the writer wrestles with his book and his family, we reexamine our thoughts about the writer. It’s a performance in which writer and reader have equal billing.”
...more