Writing Down the Shadows: Tiny Nightmares: Very Short Tales of Horror
We get to devour our horror from the top of the head down to the tips of the toes.
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Posts Tagged: stories
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #222: Kathryn Scanlan
“I work slowly, from sentence to sentence, and attempt to stay attuned to opportunity.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #204: Paulina Flores
“Working with words is a quest, not blind, but in the darkness.”
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A Heart-Centered Engagement: Heads of the Colored People by Nafissa Thompson-Spires
Thompson-Spires illustrate[s] the psychic traps set when myths take precedence over lived experience, when “the monstrous head deforms the face.”
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Girls Who Know: Jenny Zhang’s Sour Heart
Confessional without the shame of confession, the best stories in Sour Heart feel like they are being poured from a girl heart right to your ear.
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The Rumpus Interview with Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay discusses her new collection, Difficult Women, the problem with whiteness as the default and the need for diverse representation, and life as a workaholic.
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The Rumpus Interview with Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua discusses her debut collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, writing fiction in order to understand life as an American-born child of immigrants, and the importance of literary community.
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The Rumpus Interview with Robin MacArthur
Robin MacArthur discusses her debut story collection Half Wild, life in rural Vermont, and how narrative—and fiction—is key to reaching across what divides us.
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The Rumpus Interview with Charles Bock
Charles Bock discusses his new novel, Alice & Oliver, the challenges of writing from experience, and how art and life can mirror one another.
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The Rumpus Interview with Keith Lee Morris
Keith Lee Morris discusses his latest book Traveler’s Rest, Lewis and Clark, and how writing a novel about dreams requires much more than sleep.
...moreDifficult Decisions
She was fed exclusively through a gastrostomy tube. Although she couldn’t speak, she often smiled and made noises and expressed pleasure in the company of her siblings. Her parents — worried that their daughter’s continued growth would restrict her ability to join family trips, swing in the backyard, take baths or cuddle in their arms […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Sanae Ishida
Sanae Ishida discusses her debut children’s book, Little Kunoichi, The Ninja Girl, embracing her creativity after years in the corporate world, and finding inspiration in her young daughter.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jennifer Baker
The more variation we see in life, the more it becomes less about seeing one type of book by marginalized people.
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The Rumpus Interview with Antonio Ruiz-Camacho
Author Antonio Ruiz-Camacho speaks about his new collection, Barefoot Dogs, breakthrough stories, the writing process, and why translating his book for readers in Mexico feels like a homecoming.
...moreMonkeys Don’t Have Stories
The question, “why fiction?” has very much been on my mind lately, and it’s one of these things that, again, is so big, and so obvious that most people just don’t think about it. It seems obvious to people that human beings love stories. But if you think about it, it’s not at all obvious […]
...moreIshmael’s Hot Line
Step #1. Call Ishmael’s number: 774.325.0503. It goes straight to voicemail. Step #2. Listen to Ishmael’s short answering machine message. It changes weekly. Step #3. Leave a voicemail about a book you love and a story you have lived. Have a personal story linked to a book you love that you’re eager to share with the […]
...moreFacebook as Storytelling Medium
From the epic poems of old to postmodernist novels, humans have always told stories. For the Millions, Annie Abrams looks at how Facebook affects our storytelling, applying narrative/literary insights from folks like J. M. Coetzee and Ralph Waldo Emerson. A preview: What happens, though, to the identities we take on in moments of freedom from […]
...moreDo Likable Characters Equal Likable Stories?
I wonder if that is the case for many of us. Perhaps, in the widespread longing for likable characters, there is this: a desire, through fiction, for contact with what we’ve armored ourselves against in the rest of our lives, a desire to be reminded that it’s possible to open our eyes, to see, to […]
...moreThe Moth Magic
“Each time I listen to a story told aloud, and feel that direct connection with the teller, I am reminded of what a story, well told, can do.” Nathan Englander writes a love letter to the Moth — from the perspective of listener and storyteller — and compiles a sampling of Moth gems.
...moreStories We Tell
Molly Boyle writes about how murder ballads helped in her efforts to find the “sublimity of survival” after an attempted rape. “The stories we tell ourselves happen often to be about dying, in the most romantic, sometimes pat, often campy and necessarily truncated ways. But these stories tie up their loose ends. There’s a beginning, […]
...moreHow Not to Be Boring
Tim O’Brien has a really brilliant article in The Atlantic in which he argues that the biggest problem with “unsuccessful stories” is, to put it quite simply, that “they are boring.” I couldn’t agree more. O’Brien worries about the focus in writing workshops on believability and “verisimilitude.” For him, believability isn’t usually the problem. “The […]
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