nonfiction
-
The Truth about Memory
Once I decided I wasn’t going to stop if I flinched, I figured I was opening myself up to some hard stuff. So, when it came, I kind of expected it. Maybe some of the beautiful moments of my life surprised…
-
The Autobiographical Novel
Why is it not a memoir, people will ask. I tell more truth in fiction, you might say. Alexander Chee gives step-by-step instructions on how to write an autobiographical novel, and it’s beautiful.
-
Eating at the Table of Another
The critic giveth and he taketh away. In his review of Better Living Through Criticism, Jonathon Sturgeon counters A.O. Scott’s aversion to the idea of the critic as parasite: Maybe the loneliness of the American critic stems from his obsession…
-
The Way We Were
Things in my own life that make me want to write about them are often things that are unresolved. And I use writing to figure them out. Memoirists Meredith Maran, Dani Shapiro, Ayelet Waldman, Kate Christensen, and Nick Flynn speak in…
-
Truth or Consequences
I was a kid. In many ways, I’m still a kid, trapped in the extended adolescence of the post-irony, post-sincerity millennial era; I came of age in America under the Bush Administration, a world where words, masquerading as truths, became…
-
Making History Discoverable
Backlist is a new service meant to connect readers and students to curated lists of history books put together by scholars. The site’s founders solicit book lists and recommendations from scholars and historians, with a goal of exposing people to books…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, talks about her new memoir, A House of My Own, living in a post-9/11 era, and the necessity of heartbreak.
-
The Middle East in Writing
Increasingly, a writer needs an access point, a micro-focus, a close-up lens—even a gimmick: one small story through which larger historical truths can be elucidated anew. For the Los Angeles Review of Books, N.S. Morris writes about how journalism inform stories…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Elisa Gabbert
Author Elisa Gabbert talks about her books, The Self Unstable and The French Exit, diversity, publishing, whiteness, and writing in the Internet Age.
-
Dissecting the Essay
How does an essay comes to its final shape? What’s the morphology of nonfiction’s popular form? Over at the Ploughshares blog, E. V. De Cleyre dissects works by Ander Monson, Claudia Rankine, Eula Biss, Leslie Jamison, and Maggie Nelson to get…
-
The Rumpus Interview with Janice Erlbaum
Janice Erlbaum talks about her new novel, I, Liar, how writing memoir compares to writing fiction, homelessness in America, and Munchausen syndrome and Borderline Personality Disorder.
-
Fact, Fiction, Other
Geoff Dyer, author of numerous nonfiction titles, discusses the increasingly blurry border between fiction and nonfiction—and more importantly, whether that distinction matters—at the Guardian: As the did-it-really-happen? issue gives way to questions of style and form, so we are brought back to…