Between Lightness and Shadow: A Conversation with Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova discusses her latest book, TO THE LAKE.
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Posts Tagged: psychology
I Had to Go There: Talking with Enzo Silon Surin
Enzo Silon Surin discusses his debut poetry collection, WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST.
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Trauma as Inheritance: Adam P. Frankel’s The Survivors
The survivor is left to ponder whom he has become.
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Cultural Attunement and “Otherness”: A Conversation with Aimee Liu
Aimee Liu discusses her new novel, GLORIOUS BOY.
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Losing the World
When we begin life, language is play.
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Writing Small Moments: A Conversation with Suzanne Farrell Smith
Suzanne Farrell Smith discusses her debut memoir, THE MEMORY SESSIONS.
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Being Seen: A Conversation with Lane Moore
Lane Moore discusses her first book, HOW TO BE ALONE.
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Finding the World Within
Secrets are expectations passed down over silent years.
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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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Our Madness: Talking with Sarah Fawn Montgomery
Sarah Fawn Montgomery discusses her debut memoir, QUITE MAD.
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Breathing into the Paper Bag: Talking with Jenny Valentish
Jenny Valentish discusses her memoir, WOMEN OF SUBSTANCES.
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We’re All Unreliable Narrators: Talking with R.O. Kwon
R.O. Kwon discusses her debut novel, THE INCENDIARIES.
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A Haunted Reality: Jac Jemc’s The Grip of It
The narration isn’t dispassionate, but there’s a distance.
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Mixed Feelings: Your Divorce Won’t Ruin Your Kids
Marriage is one way of housing love. But there are a hundred other houses—sometimes you just have to build them yourself.
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The Color of Discipline
The violence inflicted by black parents onto their children was born out of both love and a deep, abiding fear for that child’s ability to survive the American caste system that devalues black life.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Melissa Febos
Melissa Febos discusses her new book Abandon Me, choosing to be celibate for six months, letting go of our own mythologies, and the sexist reaction women receive when they write nonfiction.
...moreWeekly Geekery
The hot young things of science fiction. Avoid IKEA with your lover today. Love, loss, and a spritz of psychology.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #69: Steven Schwartz
Steven Schwartz’s new book, Madagascar: New and Selected Stories, positively aches (often sighs, sometimes chuckles) with wisdom. Steven understands people. He understands why they do what they do, how they feel when they’ve done it, and he understands too how the twists of life can disrupt all of that so people act in peculiar, unexpected […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Clarence Major
Clarence Major discusses his new collection Chicago Heat and Other Stories, the artist’s role in politics, Donald Trump and race relations, and Paris in the good old days.
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The Read Along: Christina Nichol
Christina Nichol, author of Waiting for the Electricity, takes a deep dive into Korean literature and catches up on some classics of anthropology and psychology.
...moreReading Emotions
There’s nothing that the book world likes to debate more than the differences between literary fiction and commercial or genre fiction. According to a new study published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts, readers of literary fiction are better able to understand emotions as compared with readers of popular genre fiction, Electric Literature […]
...moreJust Fail Your Best
Tim Falconer writes for Hazlitt on the psychological importance of failure: When you do what you’re good at exclusively, avoiding what you are bad at, you live in an evaluative world, one that’s full of judgement…. The danger is this becomes an inauthentic world, one that you don’t engage in for its own sake and […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Boy meets lichen, proves 150 years of science textbooks wrong. Want to improve your social skills? Try fiction, not speed-dating. How wasps gave us Shakespeare. In psychology, American undergrad = caveman. Birds lose sex appeal when singing over city noise. (Unlike Benedict Cumberbatch.)
...moreLiving with False Memories
For Pacific Standard, Ed Cara explores the malleability of memory and the very real and frequent occurrence of false memories, via new work by criminal psychologist and memory scientist Dr. Julia Shaw.
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The Rumpus Interview with Bernadette Murphy
Bernadette Murphy on her forthcoming book, Harley and Me: Embracing Risk on the Road to a More Authentic Life, the challenges of selling a memoir, and life beyond “the suburban-wife-mother picture.”
...moreMind Over Genre
Over at Lit Hub, Jennifer R. Bernstein confronts the disciplinary rift that has grown between psychology and literature to show how the two are linked, even nested inside one another in our studies of self and pain: For these authors were writing literature of a kind; you could hear it in the music of their […]
...moreHello! Bonjour! Hola! Hallo!
Interpreting someone’s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. What does a speaker know or not know? What did she intend to convey? Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide routine practice in considering the perspectives of others. Growing up in a multilingual environment has […]
...moreBlocking Writer’s Block
The New Yorker’s Maria Konnikova reveals the cause of writer’s block, the psychological state of those that have it and those that don’t, and how to combat it: …many symptoms of writer’s block are the kinds of problems psychiatrists think about. Unhappy writers, it seemed, were unhappy in their own ways, and would require therapies tailored […]
...moreWriting as a Cure
Word by word, and brick by brick, I began understanding the foundation of myself—of where I had been, and where I would go—from previously unseen angles. Over at Brevity’s nonfiction blog, Lauretta Zucchetti shares her experience of finding herself and overcoming emotional pain through the writing process.
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