From the Archive: What It Is to Be Human: Talking with Ottessa Moshfegh
Ottessa Moshfegh discusses her new novel, MY YEAR OF REST AND RELAXATION.
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Posts Tagged: morality
We Are Not Gods: Talking with Elizabeth Ellen
Elizabeth Ellen discusses her new story collection, HER LESSER WORK.
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The Alternative Hypotheses: A Conversation with Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor discusses his new story collection, FILTHY ANIMALS.
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Lingering on Darkness: Sleepovers by Ashleigh Bryant Phillips
When Ashleigh Bryant Phillips lets loose, she can shock.
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Losing the World
When we begin life, language is play.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #218: Rufi Thorpe
“It doesn’t matter your gender or your sexual orientation; you can disorder your eating.”
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Moral Fiction: Talking with Brandon Taylor
Brandon Taylor discusses his debut novel, REAL LIFE.
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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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How Amazon Is Making Sex a Dirty Word
“[A]s long as we retain all of these conflicting ideas of what sex is, and what it means to us, sex will always sell—until it’s inconvenient.”
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Everyone Loves the Pope
My lover became the Pope. It was the twenty-tens and the Catholic Church wanted to rebrand with Newport cigarettes and Hermes chiseled calves.
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What to Read When You Want to Understand Middle America
A list of books about middle America that can, maybe, help us understand some of the stories we tell about ourselves about ourselves.
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Just Chaste Me
The more first-time stories I heard, the longer I was willing to wait.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Larissa MacFarquhar
Larissa MacFarquhar discusses her book Strangers Drowning, why she finds nonfiction so compelling, and how she gets inside the minds of her subjects.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Love = addiction. And both hijack the brain’s learning circuit. Langston Hughes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, resurrected on YouTube. The top traits of bestselling books. (Hint: Not sex.) The language you speak affects your morality. Sand avalanche! In your brain!
...moreKid’s Lit: Team Order or Team Nonsense?
Children’s literature as a genre has grown exponentially from early morality-racked lesson books to modern goofy masterpieces such as Captain Underpants—how did we switch from Order to Nonsense, and have we completely switched over? At Slate, Katy Waldman sits down with literary critic and professor Seth Lerer to discuss the evolution of children’s literature and the […]
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Letters to Laura from a McDonald’s in Brooklyn
Tonight my loneliness is infinite and I could eat dinner or dance with my limbs wild because there is no gravity keeping me grounded.
...moreA Trip to Malory Towers
At Aeon, Nakul Krishna revisits Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers, a series of boarding school novels, for a glimpse at the ethics that join Blyton’s novels together.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Bad news from the free-Internet fight is also good news in the war on Google. A bit of sexist schadenfreude. Are psychologists who study morality evil? Want to make things really scary? Here’s how to do it. How do we work together?
...moreWriters and Moral Obligation
At the New York Times Book Ends column this week, Zoë Heller and Francine Prose discuss whether or not William Faulkner’s famous quote, “The writer’s only responsibility is to his art,” holds up. In other words, Heller asks, does producing great art excuse terrible human behavior? Her conclusion is that no, it doesn’t. Prose seems to […]
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Phillip B. Williams
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Phillip B. Williams about his new book Thief in the Interior, form in poetry, and balancing editing work with one’s own.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
You know it’s fall because of the crisp air, the changing leaves, the decorative gourds, and, most importantly, because the fall issues of literary magazines are launching. This week was Virginia Quarterly Review’s turn. On Monday, its Fall 2015 issue dropped with five stories from Ann Beattie, Richard Bausch, Taylor Antrim, Praveen Krishna, and Elliott […]
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