These Places Surround Me: Talking with Quintan Ana Wikswo
Quintan Ana Wikswo discusses her novel, A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be, delving into the facets of trauma, and her creative processes.
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Posts Tagged: Virginia
Sound & Vision: Michael Hearst
Allyson McCabe talks with Michael Hearst, a founding member of One Ring Zero, about how he got his start in music and writing, and what he’s been working on recently.
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Dispatches from the Swamp: The Babble in the Bubble
To the extent that America—that great big word that makes us all so anxious—exists at all, it exists as a vast and noisy sheet of bubble wrap.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
The world’s oldest LGBTQ bookstore has opened a glory-hole inspired gallery display. Like any business, bookstores are influencing customers’ choices, and so what is literary is dictated, at least in part, by what sells.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
In Chicago, Aimee Levitt wonders how many bookstores she can visit in a single day to celebrate Independent Bookstore Day. Meanwhile, in Seattle, Moira Macdonald explains how she planned on maximizing the number of stores she visited.
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Albums of Our Lives: The Front Bottoms’ The Front Bottoms
When I first heard Brian Sella’s sweet, pathetic voice sing these words, they seared a sense of guilt into me.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Lee Clay Johnson
Lee Clay Johnson discusses his novel Nitro Mountain, growing up with bluegrass musician parents, and what people are capable of under the right set of circumstances.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Thao Nguyen’s Release
The thing I want to talk about is something I’m not in possession of anymore, but of all the things I’ve lost it’s the thing I think about the most.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Chicago bookstores are worried about the arrival of a physical Amazon store. One bookstore is using clickbait tactics on social media to trick people into reading more books. Some people actually like airport bookstores. A rural Virginia bookstore has become wildly successful.
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A Ringing in Your Ears That Would Disappear by Morning
Soon, you would discover the local isle of misfits. Every town has at least one if you do some digging. Yours was The Boathouse.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Desiree Cooper
Desiree Cooper discusses her debut collection of flash fiction, Know the Mother, what mother-writers need, and why motherhood is the only story she’s ever told.
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The Rumpus Interview with Darcey Steinke
Darcey Steinke talks about her new novel, Sister Golden Hair, motherlessness, the Southern cult of femininity, and how becoming a woman has changed since she came of age in a small city in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
...morePhillip P. Puckett: A Rumpus Roundup
Virginia State Senator Phillip P. Puckett, a Democrat, resigned on Monday. His resignation gives Republicans control of the state legislature. Puckett had planned on taking a new job as deputy of the state tobacco commission, an appointed position controlled by Republicans. Puckett’s seat in the state senate was also preventing his daughter, a provisional juvenile […]
...more250,000 Books Head to the Landfill
Book lovers, avert your eyes: the Fairfax County Public Library in Virginia took a quarter million books and threw them in the trash. It’s common for libraries to prune their collections, getting rid of outdated or unpopular books in favor of ones that circulate more widely, but this is an unusually high number thanks to […]
...moreLittle House in the Big Woods
If figurines were awarded for completing twentysomething life-experience clichés, I have been angling for the entire set: the search for myself in central European beer halls; the move west to try growing up with the country; graduate school in New York. A log cabin in the woods has the air of the final trinket on […]
...moreMattaponi Queen
In this prize-winning collection of linked stories, outcasts and fuckups “dodge what dangers they can to survive in the midst of their aching loneliness.”
...moreArlington: The Rap
“I’m ducking gunfire daily, Check to see if one got me, But that’s just life in the hood, When I go get my puffed kashi…” (via almost everyone I know in DC). More videos by Remy.
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