tropes
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Like Juggling Knives: Talking with Rumaan Alam
Rumaan Alam discusses his new novel, That Kind of Mother, the limits of the employer-employee relationship, and the grossness of heterosexual sex.
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The Unexpected Feminism of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
Perhaps it’s more productive then to think about Rebecca’s craziness as a source of sanity in a crazy world in which women are routinely disregarded.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Aurvi Sharma
Aurvi Sharma discusses her memoir-in-progress, finding inspiration in ancient women’s voices, and writing against erasure.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Suzuki and Kawasaki in the Dominican Republic
We are all punchlines. Projections of projections of projections. But whose joke is it? And where is the bill?
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The Rumpus Review of Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation
Parker set out to bring a different kind of “slavery movie” to audiences. And it is different.
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Literature’s Second-Class Citizens
They’re there but not there. They’re included but their stories don’t fully weave into the story.
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Daddy Wasn’t There
Anyone who made it through high school English can probably recall reading a story or two about young protagonists finding themselves in the absence of parental guidance. From whence does this orphan trope come? And why? Is this what all…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week, Karen Russell of Swamplandia! fame has a new story in The New Yorker that unearths the self-deceptions beneath what we often think is love, and also unearths a body. In “The Bog Girl,” a teenage boy named Cillian…
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Are You the Woman Reader?
It’s not that the books that get someone into the “serious reader” club are all or even mostly by men these days. But the books that get you kicked out of the club are almost exclusively written by women. Hannah…
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The Rumpus Interview with Manuel Gonzales
Manuel Gonzales talks about his new novel, The Regional Office is Under Attack!, transitioning from nonprofit work to teaching, and how to zig when a trope wants you to zag.
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Rationalizing Friendship
At the Guardian, A.D. Miller wonders why writers struggle to describe the “bonds” of friendship in fiction. What he finds is that close friendships are often difficult to “rationalize” because they limit access to common literary tropes: Friendship denies writers the…
