The Imprint of a Mind: Jazmina Barrera’s Linea Nigra
This sparse book, “an essay on pregnancy and earthquakes,” deals with the author’s dueling fears of recent and future earthquakes and her impending childbirth.
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Posts Tagged: Shirley Jackson
What to Read When You Want to Be Haunted
Allison Ellis shares a reading list for when you want to be haunted!
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Idra Novey
Idra Novey discusses THOSE WHO KNEW.
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The Delusion of Objectivity: Talking with Leslie Jamison
Leslie Jamison discusses The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, understanding that every text is incomplete, and whether motherhood has changed her writing.
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Moving Toward Answers: A Conversation with Stephen Mills
Poet Stephen Mills discusses his first two collections, He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices and A History of the Unmarried, teaching writing, and what’s next.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Carmen Maria Machado
Carmen Maria Machado discusses her debut story collection, Her Body and Other Parties, her favorite horror writers and movies, and writing the book(s) she’s always wanted to read.
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Can We Even Trust Ourselves?: A Conversation with Jac Jemc
Jac Jemc discusses The Grip of It, revision, and returning to the theme of trustworthiness again and again.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #91: Meghan Lamb
Author Meghan Lamb‘s new novel, Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, March 2017), is a book that cuts to the core of disturbance. In it, a woman is struck by an inexplicable and undiagnosable illness that renders her immobile and takes away her ability to speak. Her husband must become her caretaker, living with a woman […]
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Saying What Shouldn’t Be Said: A Conversation with Julie Buntin
Julie Buntin discusses her debut novel, Marlena, why writing about teenage girls is the most serious thing in the world, and finding truths in fiction.
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Worlds Full of Demons: Chavisa Woods’s Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country
We must ask ourselves: who stands in the shadows of our national persona, both historically and in the nation’s literature? Woods raises the question, and her work points toward an answer.
...moreAll That Is Suggested of Trauma
At the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates writes about Shirley Jackson through her seminal story “The Lottery,” her contemporaneous public perception via hate mail, the figure of her presented in literary biographies, the self she expressed in essays and works of memoir, her marriage made in hell, her abuse of powerful psychotropic drugs—amounting […]
...moreShirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” is Painfully Relevant Today
With so many Americans tuning in and cringing at the deluge of election controversies, we can take a little comfort that there are incredibly apt pieces of fiction to turn to for some perspective. At the Huffington Post, Claire Fallon looks at the renewed fame and interest in Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” during these troubled times, and shares snippets […]
...moreBeyond “The Lottery”
Although best known for “The Lottery”, there was much more to Shirley Jackson’s work—and life. At the New York Times, Charles McGrath reviews of Ruth Franklin’s new biography A Rather Haunted Life, and explores Franklin’s journalistic yet personal take on the woman who remains massively influential, but often overlooked in the American literary canon. In spite of (and […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Jaquira Díaz
Jaquira Díaz discusses the challenge of writing about family members, her greatest joy as a writer, and her literary role models.
...moreReaders’ Work
Vivid, shiver-inducing, short story excerpts stud “The Summer People of Shirley Jackson and Kelly Link” over at Longreads. On conjuring a story with the same title as Jackson’s original, iconic, and creepy “The Summer People,” Kelly Link says, “I liked the idea of writing a story where all the play between Jackson’s story and mine […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Victor LaValle
Victor LaValle discusses his latest book, The Ballad of Black Tom, patience, H.P. Lovecraft, and reinvention.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #67: The Franchise Restaurants of Song
Musician Owen Ashworth on his new album, Nephew in the Wild, literary influences, self-expression in songwriting, and how becoming a father has changed his work.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
The last few weeks have been all about celebrating female masters of the short story. Earlier this month, we saw collections by Clarice Lispector and Shirley Jackson making waves in the literary swimming pool, and this week Lucia Berlin enters with a cannon ball. The three have been soaking up screen time all over the Internet, with […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, two underappreciated masters of the weird and uncanny are finally getting their due attention. That’s right, we’re talking about Clarice Lispector and Shirley Jackson, two literary powerhouses who wrote contemporaneously in different styles, different languages, even different hemispheres, but who have some striking similarities. With Tuesday’s release of a collection of previously unpublished […]
...moreOn Writing and Garlic
Welcoming Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings, a new collection of Shirley Jackson’s writings out today from Random House, the New Yorker offers a three-installment series of lectures on writing by the seminal author excerpted from the book: “Memory and Delusion,” “On Fans and Fan Mail,” and “Garlic in Fiction.”
...moreWould You Rather Babysit Cathy Ames or Christine Hargensen?
What do Yukio Mishima, Tana French, Shirley Jackson, and John Steinbeck have in common? They’re the masterminds behind a couple of the most evil fictional youngsters of all time, according to a list compiled by British bookstore Abebooks. The list shuns contemporary malevolent characters in favor of the “utterly evil” children of yore, reasoning: “While […]
...moreBringing Up Baby
Shirley Jackson’s bone-chilling story “The Lottery” is probably the last thing anyone wants to associate with Mother’s Day, yet her lurking plot twists and sharp character insights are the perfect tools to write about parenting. In this month’s Slate Book Review, Dan Kois explains how Jackson’s books depicted family life well before any of us […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
It’s only February, but 2015 is already proving to be a treasure trove of big happenings in the world of short stories. Take this past Tuesday, when Kelly Link, Charles Baxter, and Neil Gaiman all released new collections, undoubtedly making the world a few orders of magnitude weirder, smarter, and spookier. With Link’s Get in Trouble, […]
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
In the latest “The Last Book I Loved,” S. Hope Mills tackles the thriller-esque 1959 novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson’s talents are strong enough to spook even the avowedly un-spookable—that woman, Mills admits, “knew what it meant to be haunted.” And Heather Partington reviews Maude Casey’s novel inspired by the true story of a 19th century […]
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The Last Book I Loved: The Haunting of Hill House
I began the novel late one gray-skyed evening, under one of those warm spring rains that make everything a little greener, a little more earthy. Not unlike the first night the guests spend in the Hill House.
...morePop Quiz, Hot Shot
No, really, here’s a fun little quiz from Bookish on trivia about classic short stories. How much do you remember about the tiny details from classic short stories like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or John Cheever’s “The Swimmer”?
...moreYou Might Never Find Your Way Back: Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman
There are other odd, improbable, tenuous connections, as if Hangsaman had a secret way of speaking to (or through) other artifacts beyond its time.
...moreYeah Yeah Yeahs Release Surprisingly Literary Music Video
Regardless of your level of enamoration with indie-rock mainstays the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, if you’re a Rumpus reader, you’ll probably dig the video for their new single “Sacrilege.” It unfolds like a short story, with a perfectly deployed reverse timeline and undertones of dark classics like Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” Watch it—watch it twice!
...moreAfter 65 Years, “The Lottery” Endures
Since its publication in 1948, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson has become an American classic, appearing in high school classrooms, as well as in the hands and on the computers of people around the nation. On the 65th anniversary of the publication of “The Lottery,” Ruth Franklin at the New Yorker discusses the 300+ letters, most […]
...moreThe Strange World of Shirley Jackson
“Shirley and Stanley lived with their children and 30,000 books in a rambling Victorian house near the post office in the village where Shirley had so memorably set her classic 1948 short story, ‘The Lottery.’ “Shirley did the family driving, the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning, the childcare and the creative writing. Stanley did his […]
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