This Thing of Existence: Talking with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his new story collection, THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU.
...more
Posts Tagged: Paul Beatty
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #183: Ryan Chapman
“[Y]ou really want to engage a reader, and not abuse their time.”
...more
Notable San Francisco: 3/13–3/19
Literary events in and around the Bay Area this week!
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Jon Day
Jon Day discusses his memoir, Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, the bicycle as a symbol of gentrification, and the city as “a technology for living.”
...more
VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tara Betts
Tara Betts discusses her newest collection, Break the Habit, the burden placed on black women artists to be both artist and activist, and why writing is rooted in identity.
...more“A Changed World”
Don’t write about trying to change the world, just write about a changed world or a world that’s not changing. Let that do the work. Paul Beatty’s formally experimental, informally humanely scathing novel about race, The Sellout, has just won the Man Booker Prize. Chris Paul Wolfe interviews Beatty for Guernica, touching on invented languages […]
...moreUnstuck in Time
Despite its uncanny salience in the context of this most recent wave of social injustice and protest, Paul Beatty’s The Sellout was written well before the #BlackLivesMatter movement began. Far from a coincidence, the book’s resonance is a product of the same paradox of time it describes, in which dated social conditions cannot possibly continue […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Darryl Pinckney
If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away. Ask them to trust you with the truth.
...moreA Philip Roth for a New Generation
Superficially, Philip Roth and Paul Beatty might appear as polar opposites. But over at Forward, Hannah Assouline argues that Beatty could be Roth’s literary heir. Assouline calls Beatty’s latest novel, The Sellout, a “generation’s answer to Roth,” and compares the novel to Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint: “The Sellout” — which concerns a California sociologist’s son brought before the […]
...moreNotable NYC: 4/18–4/24
Saturday 4/18: Paul Beatty discusses The Sellout, Brooklyn Public Library, 4 p.m., free (RSVP recommended). Sara Fetherolf, John Reid Currie, Zakia Henderson-Brown, and Carrie Meyers join the Oh, Bernice! reading series. Astoria Bookshop, 7 p.m., free. Leslie Allison, Filip Marinovich, and Lewis Warsh celebrate the launch of their books from Ugly Duckling Presse. Pierogi Gallery, […]
...more
The Sellout by Paul Beatty
Luke Wiget reviews The Sellout by Paul Beatty today in Rumpus Books.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Chalk it up to a week where Twitter just felt like too much. Chalk it up to good ol’ nostalgia for the feel of a hefty book in your hands. Or maybe, just chalk it up to an aligning of stars that placed nine exceptional writers under the same roof. If you happen to have […]
...moreNotable NYC: 3/7–3/13
Saturday 3/7: Cynthia Daignault and Joseph Mosconi join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., free. Sunday 3/8: Ashley C. Ford, Daniel Jose Older, and Cynthia Cruz launch a new discussion series, The Hustle, that examines how writers work. WORD Brooklyn, 2 p.m., free. Elissa Schappell and Lynne Tillman celebrate International Women’s Day. Over the […]
...moreNovelist Brings Slavery to California
In an interview with NPR, novelist and funnyman Paul Beatty discusses his novel The Sellout, and what’s on his mind when creating a world where plantation culture is reborn in California. The novel focuses on Bonbon, an African American man who reacts to the accidental shooting of his father by the LAPD by re-segregating his […]
...moreNotable NYC: 2/28–3/6
Saturday 2/28: Tom McCarthy reads Satin Island, a novel about writing the Great Report. 192 Books, 7 p.m., free. Claudia Rankine and Elizabeth Alexander read from their latest works. McNally Jackson, 7 p.m., free. Sunday 3/1: Joanna Fuhrman, Shelley Marlow, and Elissa Ball celebrate new books by Fuhrman and Marlow. Molasses Books, 8 p.m., free. […]
...more
The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Hilton Als
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Hilton Als about his new collection White Girls, an intriguing amalgam of fiction, essay, and memoir.
...more