Rumpus Original Fiction: The Tangible Darkness
The ground trembles, setting his flesh and bones vibrating.
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Posts Tagged: tragedy
Trudging Down Death Road
Reveal yourself. Reveal yourself. You cannot be dead. Reveal yourself.
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Ready to See Magic Everywhere: Talking with Rachel Lyon
Rachel Lyon discusses her debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, artistic communities, the quotidian nature of the supernatural, and hyper-gentrification.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #63: Patrick Madden
Patrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He pays close attention to the details of the every day, infusing humor and self-deprecation, combining […]
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The Last Book I Loved: So Long, See You Tomorrow
By drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives.
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The Rumpus Interview with Vi Khi Nao
Vi Khi Nao on her new novel Fish in Exile, why women shouldn’t apologize (even when they’re wrong), moving between genres, and why humor is vital in a novel full of darkness and grief.
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The Rumpus Review of One More Time with Feeling
“We didn’t ask for it,” Cave begins another poetic flight, and again we think he’s talking about something ghastly, “but it’s all around us, a gratuitous beauty.”
...moreTo Speak Unsatisfactorily
To memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence. For The Nation, Becca Rothfeld writes about W.G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants, among others, and his obsession with artistic expression as the aestheticization of truth, almost necessarily a “mangling,” when the goal is […]
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This Week in Short Fiction: Goodnight, Beautiful Women by Anna Noyes
[Noyes’s] stories are nuanced and unapologetic, revealing the shadow sides of women and girls in all their wild and terrible glory.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Should Facebook decide what qualifies as tragedy? How can technology shape stories beyond how they are displayed? Herzog on reality. Would our Founding Fathers approve of copyright law?
...moreNo Hope
Rumpus Interviews Editor Ben Pfeiffer discusses the complete loss of hope in Anton Chekhov’s literary works, in relation to modern TV shows such as The Leftovers and The Walking Dead. Pfeiffer wonders why people have continued to, watch, read, and create these dark, despairing works when we already live in a world of tragedy: …a […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Review: 99 Homes
99 Homes continues Bahrani’s tendency to take on big topics, to cut them into chewable pieces for its audience
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The Rumpus Interview with Christopher Bollen
Author Christopher Bollen talks about his sophomore novel, Orient, secrets and privacy, sexual orientation in fiction, and the lost art of the whodunit mystery.
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The Rumpus Interview with Neil Smith
Author Neil Smith discusses his latest book, Boo, the suffering inherent in being thirteen years old, and how friendship can help pull us through traumatic events in our lives.
...moreDelivering Whisky After An Earthquake
As I worked, filing reports every night from a hotel room, the details nagged at me. Her mother, Japa Tamang, was living in an open-sided shed once used to store grain, in hills still shuddering from aftershocks. My husband had the idea of giving her a ride back to Kathmandu and a plane ticket to […]
...moreWho Do You Cry For?
Who do we remember and why do we mourn? Teju Cole writes about unmournable bodies for the New Yorker.
...moreSong of the Day: “Micheline”
A standout record in Mark Kozelek’s long career is the critically-lauded 2014 release, Benji. The presence of everyday tragedies permeates the record and propels the keening voice of Kozelek, aka Sun Kil Moon. On “Micheline,” he offers us three stories whose sad endings are complicated by a rich, guitar-driven melody in a major key. In […]
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Tragedy is Fast, Knowledge is Slow
For months, I had worked to help students make connections between sports and society, to help them analyze and interrogate media representations of sport and of athletes….In the immediate aftermath of the Boston bombings, I had no answers and very little context.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
Check out these tasty Rumpus morsels, posted over the weekend! Wendy Ortiz interviews poet Louise Mathias about beauty, ecstasy, and eroticism…and “snakes and horses and sky and birds and hallucinogenic flowers, and stars, and the smell of creosote after rain, and…” When journalist Maggie Downs lost a friend in a skydiving accident, many of her […]
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