We Should Be Embarrassed by Most Things: An Interview with Leyna Krow
I think that is the dream—to have such a strong voice that people know your work as your work.
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Posts Tagged: Vonnegut
Life Is Odd: A Conversation with Dinty W. Moore
Dinty W. Moore discusses his new essay collection, TO HELL WITH IT.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #60: Leah Kaminsky
Leah Kaminsky’s debut novel, The Waiting Room, depicts one fateful day in the life of an Australian doctor and mother, Dina, living in Haifa, Israel. Dina is trying to maintain normalcy as she goes about her work as a family doctor, cares for her son, and fights to preserve her faltering relationship with her husband, […]
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The Night Faerie
We were all free-falling, and there was no one, nothing, to catch us.
...moreStructure as Lightning Rod
Writing for The Millions, M.C. Mah turns over all the cards in the deck on structure in storytelling. He gathers words of wisdom—and many metaphors—from luminaries like John McPhee, Borges, Vonnegut, and George Saunders, and then links the contemporary “horoscopic style” of structuring to an “anxiety about a better way to tell a story…” possibly […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Saša Stanišić
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Saša Stanišić about his novel Before the Feast, the challenge of writing a plural narrator, working with a translator, and book tours in Germany.
...moreThose Kinds Of People are The Only People Here
Electric Literature posts a graduation speech from Vonnegut; he riffs on World War II, busboys, ambition, and suicide notes: A young woman told me a couple of years ago that she had applied for admission here. The man who interviewed her asked her why she had found the place attractive. She said it was because […]
...moreWord of the Day: Woofits
(n.); an unwell feeling, particularly in the head; a moody depression; c. 1918, from Nevil Shute’s The Rose and the Rainbow The archetype of the mad genius dates back to at least classical times, when Aristotle noted, “Those who have been eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia.” […]
...moreDear Son or Daughter
Here is the problem in writing letters to your kids—perhaps especially as a writer, who has arguably spent her entire professional life writing letters to everyone who isn’t her kids: How do you suddenly start writing in a grand literary fashion to two small people whom, heretofore, you pretty much have only talked to as […]
...moreLit Clicks and Small Bubbles (and Long, Zany Titles)
Did Vonnegut call it when he expressed his concerns about literature “disappearing up its own [asterisks]”? To all the postmodern articles on why postmodern articles don’t get looked at, to all the callow insecurity, the boggy, invasive, self-reflexivity, the semantic, obsessive, genre-tagging: Stop it and write. Write. Write. Like a motherfucker, write. Or if you’re […]
...moreMorning Coffee
Kurt Vonnegut’s letter home. Abandoned wood burning stoves. A look inside a San Francisco opium den circa 1889. Rebecca Ward‘s tape installations. Pickled evidence for evolution.
...moreJosh Nathan: The Last Book I Loved, Slapstick
I began reading Kurt Vonnegut after I had slid too far down to climb back up the slide of becoming a full-blown pessimist. I remember feeling this during a month long trip to Mexico. I saw villages with homes made of cardboard boxes and sheet metal. I saw the corrupt government manipulating its uneducated citizens […]
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