Investigative but Intimate: A Conversation with Robert L. Shuster
Robert L. Shuster discusses his debut novel, TO ZENZI.
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Posts Tagged: Nabokov
We’re All Difficult Women Now: Talking with Avni Doshi
Avni Doshi discusses her debut novel, BURNT SUGAR.
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Desire Makes Storytellers of Us All: Anthropica by David Hollander
What a fitting end to the postmodern literary experiment. Or are we just getting warmed up?
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Voices on Addiction: There Were Also Girls, Women
I always thought I was too smart to be one of those girls.
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Setting Yourself Free: A Conversation with Alisson Wood
Alisson Wood discusses her debut memoir, BEING LOLITA.
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What to Read When You Want to Read Lolita
Alisson Wood shares a reading list to celebrate her debut memoir, BEING LOLITA.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “The Warning Bell”
“You are so sexy,” he said. I met his gaze. And the warning bell rang.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Tracy O’Neill
Tracy O’Neill discusses her new novel QUOTIENTS.
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How Patterns Break: Talking with Linda Bierds
Poet Linda Bierds discusses her newest collection, THE HARDY TREE.
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The Desire to Be: Talking with Garrard Conley and Taylor Larsen
Garrard Conley and Taylor Larsen discuss their recent work.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #184: Caroline Hagood
“I wanted to write a manifesto on the artistic act of a woman looking and making.”
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Doing the Work of Empathy: A Conversation with Marin Sardy
Marin Sardy discusses her debut memoir, THE EDGE OF EVERY DAY: SKETCHES OF SCHIZOPHRENIA.
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Questions of Legacy: Talking with Adrienne Celt
Adrienne Celt discusses her forthcoming novel, Invitation to a Bonfire, how she found its characters’ voices, and what it means to build a legacy.
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Finding Comfort in the Discomfort: Talking with Juan Martinez
Juan Martinez discusses his debut collection Best Worst American, his relationship to the English language, and why Nabokov ruined his writing for years.
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What to Read When You Want to Make America Great Again
Here is a list of books that help remind us what actually makes America great (hint: it’s not tax cuts).
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A Dyslexic’s Guide to Infinity
In my memory, the Learning Support room is always shadowy. Outside, other girls are forever laughing as they amble past.
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The Rumpus Interview with Tobias Carroll
Tobias Carroll discusses his newest collection Transitory, the influence of film on his writing, and getting good news at bad times.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Chris Santiago
Chris Santigo on his new collection Tula, writing a multilingual text, and the connections between music and writing poetry.
...moreA Tumblr Full of Lolitas
On the Ploughshares blog, Mishka Hoosen explores the phenomenon of young women claiming for themselves the “nymphet” moniker on various Tumblr pages. Hoosen argues that it is more than simplistic fetishization of the themes induced by Nabokov’s Lolita—these women are owning their forbidden sexuality within the protections allowed them. Like the Lolita character, they claim this […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Rich Cohen
Rich Cohen discusses his new book The Sun & the Moon & the Rolling Stones, writing book proposals, and interviewing rock stars.
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The Rumpus Interview with Annie DeWitt
Annie DeWitt discusses her debut novel, White Nights in Split Town City, the 90s, and the brutality of nature.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Nabokov’s epilepsy, heart problems, and unpublished letters. A dictionary for the fleshy bits of brain that store our words. Ephemerality meets Instagram. The secret sauce behind NBC’s Olympics telecast. Your designated BFF might not even know your name.
...moreRemembering Jenny Diski
At n+1, philosopher and writer Justin E.H. Smith remembers Jenny Diski, and shares their correspondence. For Diski, death was always the subject, the knot to admire, wryly, and attempt to untie: …the year before her diagnosis, Jenny invokes the bleak wisdom of Beckett’s line, “Birth was the death of him.” She wonders with Nabokov why […]
...moreThe Prison House of English
For the NYRB, Tim Parks meditates on writing in English through investigating various authors who made switches from native tongues to the more economically viable lingua franca, like Nabokov and Conrad—or who did the exact opposite, like Jhumpa Lahiri—all in effort to answer the question: Why write in English?
...moreThe Butterfly Effect
At The New Republic, Laura Marsh examines the interplay—or lack thereof—between Nabokov’s identities as a writer and a lepidopterist. In her investigative and detailed cataloguing of scientific and literary happenings, her only steadfast finding may be this: “There’s a special sense in which all of this activity, however unenlightening, is essentially Nabokovian.”
...moreWeekly Geekery
Facial recognition technology is a little racist. Two writers talk about the end of the world and more importantly, the end of social media. Robots are just babies—tiny, terrifying babies. Nabokov and butterfly sex.
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The Rumpus Interview with Rob Roberge
Rob Roberge talks about his new memoir, Liar, the differences between writing fiction and writing memoir, and why every narrator is an unreliable narrator.
...moreWomen are People—Who Knew?
…there is a canonical body of literature in which women’s stories are taken away from them, in which all we get are men’s stories. And that these are sometimes not only books that don’t describe the world from a woman’s point of view, but inculcate denigration and degradation of women as cool things to do. […]
...moreWe Wish You A Literary Christmas
From Dickens to Nabokov to Ali Smith, Kate Webb traces the history of authors pondering Christmas, and the 21st century revival of the Christmas story: Even in our prickly individualism, hemmed in by consumer goods, there are moments when we can escape from safe, homogenized lives to experience the tingling pleasures of heat and cold, […]
...moreOdes to Lolita, the Sexuagenarian
It was like being marched through someone’s private idea of a perfect night, a night where I was the center but one that had curiously little to do with me at all—all of which is to say that in an equation of desire, the object of desire can be integral and incidental at the same […]
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