the stranger
-

The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Danzy Senna
Danzy Senna discusses New People, inhabiting her characters without judging them, playing with the reality and surreality of identity, and pushing against traditional story arcs.
-

The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #56: Patricia Engel
I met one of my favorite writers before she ever published a single story. We were classmates vying for our MFAs in Creative Writing from Florida International University and would smile at each other from across the room. She was…
-

A Productive Unhappiness
Why is it that knowing how to remain alone in Paris for a year in a miserable room teaches a man more than a hundred literary salons and forty years’ experience of ‘Parisian life’? Over at the Paris Review Daily,…
-

Writing for All
At The Stranger, Rich Smith describes the Till Writer’s Residency program at Smoke Farm in Arlington, Washington. Unlike most residency programs, which are expensive and require writers to pay for travel, the Till Residency is affordable and aims to provide a…
-

A Spirit of Rebellion
Maddie Crum interviews Jacques Ferrandez, who adapted Albert Camus’s classic The Stranger into a graphic novel, on the importance of The Stranger, his personal connection to it, and more: The book is about the human condition and also about youth.…
-

A for Effort
Lit Hub has just released Book Marks, a book review aggregator which provides a grading system for books. At The Stranger, Rich Smith talks about what this means, grade inflation, and more: The point of a book review isn’t to sell books…
-

Saving Trees
For The Stranger, Rich Smith reviews Even Though the Whole World Is Burning, the film about poet W.S. Merwin and his life as a conservationist in Hawaii: The film glorifies Merwin as a giver of life, a distinction that invites an…
-

Little Theaters of Heat
Christopher Frizzelle shares a dazzling review of Garth Greenwell’s debut novel, What Belongs to You, praising its ferocity and intense exploration of homosexuality: These “little theaters of heat,” these packets of desire or panic or imminence, these doublings-down of doubt and upswellings…
-

Oxford Dictionary of Emojis
For The Stranger, Rich Smith justifies Oxford Dictionaries’s choice for the UK’s Word of the Year: an emoji. Although OD has been getting backlash from critics lamenting “the death of language, the end of the world, etc.,” Smith claims that emojis are just…


