nonfiction
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The Rumpus Interview with Sandra and Ben Doller
Sandra and Ben Doller talk about The Yesterday Project, a blind collaboration, and about what it means to savor each day when you have stage III melanoma.
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An End Has a Start
At the Ploughshares blog, E. V. De Cleyre considers the many ways to find the right moment to end a nonfiction story: The aftermath, Cusk writes, is “life with knowledge of what has gone before.” Writers are not seers. Armed with…
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The Rumpus Interview with Valeria Luiselli
Valeria Luiselli talks about her new novel, The Story of My Teeth, working with a translator to publish her books in English, and how writing in weekly installments changed her process.
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The Skeleton of a Story
Over at Brevity’s nonfiction blog, author Janice Gary talks about how to structure a nonfiction story: Fiction writers start with nothing and create a world. Memoirists start with an entire universe that already exists. We are more like sculptors than…
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Stealing Documents and Memory
Travis McDade writes for Lit Hub on the theft of primary source documents from libraries and how the precarious state of our archives affects our nonfiction narratives and memory.
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(Almost) Meaning
Over at Granta, Greg Jackson thinks about fiction in contrast with nonfiction, and how writers choose to write fiction precisely because they do not know exactly what they want to say, although it is expected that they do and are…
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The Rumpus Interview with Matt Bell
Author Matt Bell talks video games, fiction, nonfiction, politics, empathy, and his new books, Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn and Scrapper.
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The Rumpus Interview with Margo Jefferson
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson talks about her new memoir, Negroland, and about growing up in an elite black community in the segregated Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.
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Truth and Beauty
Fiction is, by definition, made up. We know this, yet still we try to “figure out” where stories come from. At Lit Hub, Leslie Pietrzyk wonders why readers are so eager to ground imagination in reality: Why is that always the question fiction…
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Italian Author Denies He Plagiarized
Daily Beast journalist Michael Moynihan recently accused Italian journalist Roberto Saviano of plagiarizing lesser-known journalists for his latest book, Zero Zero Zero. The book, which Saviano is now calling a “nonfiction novel,” is an expose of international drug trafficking. But, asserts…
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Judging the Judges
This year’s judges of the National Book Award seem to agree that women’s nonfiction writing is abundant and prize-worthy. The 2015 nonfiction longlist includes seven female-authored books, out of 10, the largest percentage of female nominees in the prize’s history.…
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The Rumpus Interview with Susan Shapiro
Susan Shapiro discusses her latest novel, What’s Never Said, her Instant Gratification Takes Too Long teaching method, and new anti-dating rules between faculty and students at universities such as Harvard and Yale.