short story
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Alice Munro Round-Up
As you may have heard by now, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature! If you are not familiar with Munro’s work, Slate has a list of her best stories to read first. Find out why The New Yorker…
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Weekly Rumpus Fiction: Sandra Gail Lambert
The next Weekly Rumpus brings you fiction from Sandra Gail Lambert! Here’s an excerpt: Running didn’t help. It just turned you into prey. Ruth Ann knew the exact moment she learned this. She had started taking a bookbinding class on…
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THE LONELY VOICE #24: ON KAWABATA, MORE SEX THAN SEX, THOUGHTS ON A PALM OF THE HAND STORY
Not long before his suicide in April 1972, Yasunari Kawabata did something that has perplexed me for years.
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“Boy, A History”
“In line in the cafeteria, at his favorite table in the library, on the last block before the block he lives on, the inside of Boy’s head is one blank notebook page after another.” At Guernica, Roxane Gay guest-edited Rumpus contributor Saeed…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Robot journalists! What could possibly go wrong? (via Book Bench) “Houses are not homes – they are holes and caves.” Apparently, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi is a short story writer. And he’s not very good. Happy birthday to the Millions!…
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Greetings, Rumpusers. You might have been relieved to see me go for a bit, but you had to know you couldn’t get rid of me forever. I’m back from a life-alteringly excellent trip to Los Angeles, where I finished school,…
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American Short Story Writers Are Taught To Do It Wrong
John Barry has a piece up at The Baltimore City Paper in which he argues that too many American short story writers are taught to try to mimic that famous last paragraph in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead.” And…
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Attention Spans are Not the Problem
A few weeks ago, I argued that the Internet age was uniquely well suited to selling short story collections. A few commenters did not agree with what seemed to be implicit in my argument: the idea that the “short attention…
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Smart People Talk Short Stories
In a post last week titled More Crappy News for Short Story Writers, I lamented what I considered to be a lost opportunity for the big publishing houses. They could, I suggested, use similarities between good short story writing and…
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THE LONELY VOICE #6: The Rumpus Short Story Column, Death and the Dying Chekhov
The lonely voice is coming to you today from San Francisco General Hospital. I’m in the cafeteria. I come here sometimes. It’s a nice place to be distracted and the pudding is good. I’m thinking about Chekhov, or trying to,…
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THE LONELY VOICE #5, The Rumpus Short Story Column: We Are All Lizzie Borden
This happens sometimes. I got murder on the brain this morning.
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The Rumpus Interview with Catherine Brady
“I don’t think virtue has a downside. I think human nature does… There’s something heroic to me about people taking risks for the sake of this fragile and intangible thing.”