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The Rumpus Interview with Maxwell Neely-Cohen
Earlier this year, I got to be one of the blurbists for Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s Echo of the Boom. Mine went like this: “The four teen survivors and survivalists at the core of Maxwell Neely-Cohen’s debut...
View ArticleRationalizing 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...
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The Rumpus Interview with Manuel Gonzales
Manuel Gonzales’s first book, The Miniature Wife, a collection of short stories, was often compared to work by George Saunders, Aimee Bender, and Karen Russell. Three years ago, shortly after the...
View ArticleAre 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...
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The Rumpus Review of Mustang: Five French Girls Walk into an Anatolian Village
A few nights ago, I reluctantly watched the French-produced, Academy Award-nominated movie, Mustang. It had been recommended to me—twice—by a trusted source. Furthermore, as more and more American...
View ArticleThis 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...
View ArticleDaddy 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...
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Literature’s Second-Class Citizens
All my life, I have tried to keep quiet. As an Asian-American who grew up in the 1980s in places where whites were the majority, I wanted to assimilate. I didn’t want to be that minority, you know, the...
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The Rumpus Review of Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation
D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation opened to both protest and critical acclaim in 1915. Griffith’s film captivated audiences at a time when Ku Klux Klan membership was on the rise, expanding...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Suzuki and Kawasaki in the Dominican Republic
February 2013 Off the southeastern coast of the Dominican Republic lies what was once a small fishing village, now dominated by international behemoths—four- and five-star all-inclusive hotels with...
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Aurvi Sharma
I was introduced to Aurvi Sharma’s work through “Revenge Porn,” a jaw-dropper of a nonfiction story that left me unsettled, my head buzzing with my own memories of feeling tender and vulnerable beneath...
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The Unexpected Feminism of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
“Paula, I am marrying Josh Chan…” Trying on a delicate glue-gunned together veil for her upcoming wedding, Rebecca Bunch speaks to her friend in an incredulous whisper. A beat, then the scene spirals...
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Like Juggling Knives: Talking with Rumaan Alam
That Kind of Mother is Rumaan Alam’s second novel. Set in the 1980s, it’s the tale of Rebecca Stone, an aspiring poet in Washington, DC. She’s married to a very British man named Christopher. At the...
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FUNNY WOMEN: Lifetime Network’s New Channel for Men
Here at Lifetime, we’re committed to offering the type of programming you’ve come to expect: riveting tales of persistent stalkers, abductions of teenage girls on swim teams, and criminally insane love...
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You Like That, Baby?: The Myth of Feminine Mystery
The last time I had the misfortune of getting back into the hetero dating scene, I met Aiden on OkCupid. Going to a bar or a social event to meet people is not only time-consuming but also requires...
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FUNNY WOMEN: Manic Pixie Dream Girl, The Spin-Offs
Clinically Depressed Pixie Dream Girl: After pointing out the futility of climbing the corporate ladder, the Clinically Depressed Pixie Dream Girl invites an uptight businessman into her blanket fort....
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Love, Marriage, and the Bicultural Identity: Talking with Huda Al-Marashi
Huda Al-Marashi’s memoir, First Comes Marriage: My Not-So-Typical American Love Story is a fresh take on immigration, love, and virgin sexuality. Huda meets Hadi, the boy she will ultimately marry,...
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A Badass Just Because: Talking with Steph Post
The dark side of the circus midway is territory we’ve tread many times before, but as Steph Post is apt to do, she refuses to make her new novel Miraculum, forthcoming from Polis Books on January 22,...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Nicole Dennis-Benn
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Nicole Dennis-Benn about her second novel, Patsy (Liveright, June 2019), writing against tropes about immigrants and motherhood, letting go of her characters when a book...
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Driven from the Village with Pitchforks
The monster in Frankenstein believes that someone might want to help him, and it nearly gets him killed. The monster understands that he is unlike other people—he’s never seen any other eight-foot-tall...
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