nonfiction
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The Rumpus Interview with Kenny Porpora
Kenny Porpora discusses his memoir The Autumn Balloon, addiction and alcoholism, writing truthfully about his mother, falling asleep at Burger King with his laptop while drafting, and how he finally found his personal writing style.
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Different Worlds
While the boundary between fiction and nonfiction has never been clearly defined, no one said crossing over would be easy. For the Daily Beast, Esther Freud describes how she made the jump: If I was writing about a real person,…
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Writing and Collecting
When I left the house on Pace Street and moved to Vermont, I became a writer. I became a writer because I was so broken down by early motherhood that I stopped fearing criticism long enough to throw my work…
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Peeking at Leaks
The joy of reading other people’s mail is a well-known, well-documented phenomenon. Inspired by the Sony data hack, Lydia Kiesling investigates the pleasure of looking at famous people’s personal correspondence over at The Millions.
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The Rumpus Interview with Daisy Hernández
Daisy Hernández talks about her new memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed, feminism, bilingual writing, and working in both the fiction and nonfiction genres.
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How Not to Break
For NYT Magazine, Wils S. Hylton tackles the myth of Laura Hillenbrand, the bestselling nonfiction author who never really leaves her house: She is cut off not only from basic tools of reporting, like going places and seeing things, but also…
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A Biography of the Biography
For literary biography to survive as a genre, it ought to take its lead from literature and go even further. For the Guardian, Stuart Kelly looks at the history of biographies and argues that the form should catch up with…
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Joshua Davis’s Spare Parts
Everyone loves a good underdog story, but Joshua Davis isn’t going to give us one. His new book Spare Parts, released this Tuesday, profiles four Mexican American teenagers who won a national robotics competition with a machine made from garbage…
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The Rumpus Interview with Suki Kim
Suki Kim discusses her new memoir, Without You, There Is No Us, going undercover for research, growing up as an immigrant to the U.S., and spending six months trapped in North Korea.
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The Big Idea: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines.
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Creativity Is Messy
Technically perfect writing is important when it comes to journalism or nonfiction, and especially helpful when writing with short deadlines. Fiction writing is different though. Nicole Bernier, over at Beyond the Margins, explains why grammatically sloppy writing might be the…
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Crashing on Ice
The sound you hear when you put ice cubes into warm (but not hot) water—that subtle but quick crackling—is the sound all around you in the summer fjords near glaciers. There is ice everywhere in the water, the size of…