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The Rumpus Interview with Yiyun Li
“The style in the second collection is more developed, more established. I feel like I’m more mature as a storyteller now and I also know what kind of stories I want to tell.”I first interviewed Yiyun...
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No One Is Innocent
Yiyun Li’s arresting debut novel, The Vagrants, should be required reading for anyone interested in political fanaticism and state-sponsored tyranny.When I think of Beijing in 1998, I think of a...
View ArticleA Barricade of Books
Yiyun Li in The New Yorker:Despite my rudimentary understanding of the language, most evenings, after lights-out, I would sneak away to the platoon storage room, where I could take a leave from my...
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Notable New York, This Week 11/2 – 11/8
This week in New York, Performa 09 festival of performing arts inspired by Futurist film, music and literature opens, Bomb throws a Fall Issue Launch Party, Books & Quiche Reading Series is back...
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The Neighbors’ Troubles
Winner of the John Simmons Short Fiction Award, Josh Rolnick’s debut collection, Pulp and Paper reveals the crisp details that line the crises of our daily lives.In each of the eight stories comprising...
View ArticleMcSweeney’s Night of One Hundred Apocalypses
Quick! Think of some apocalypses! How many did you think of? For Lucy Corin, the answer is one hundred, and some others. That’s why she named her book One Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses.To...
View ArticleSecond Time’s the Charm
Slate and the Whiting Foundation have teamed up to save authors from the dreaded sophomore slump in a quest to unearth the five best second novels of the last five years. Novelists Yiyun Li and Colson...
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The Rumpus Interview with Antonio Ruiz-Camacho
For years, Antonio Ruiz-Camacho, author of the superb debut collection Barefoot Dogs, had the biography of a writer—a childhood in a political family in Mexico, a stint selling handicrafts in Madrid, a...
View ArticleScratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living edited by Manjula Martin
The title appears in gold on a giant fountain pen: Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living. Floating around the pen on the pale green cover are a swath of handwritten names—Cheryl...
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What to Read When: A Holiday Book-Gifting Guide
Last week, we offered up our best book-gifting recommendations for children. This week, we’re turning our attention to the 18+ crowd. We’ve asked our editors to give us their favorite books to gift to...
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People and Poetry: A Conversation with Kim Fu
When five girls become lost in the wilderness of a Pacific Northwest island without an adult to guide them, it’s easy to assume The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore is about whether or not they’ll...
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What to Read When You Want Short Stories
I didn’t know what I was getting into to when I decided to be the editor for Everyday People: The Color of Life—A Short Story Anthology. I knew that I loved short fiction; I believe some of the best...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #157: Sarah Viren
Sarah Viren is the author of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize-winning essay collection Mine. Each essay in this collection considers ownership or perceived ownership. Viren writes about her...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Esmé Weijun Wang
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Esmé Weijun Wang about her new essay collection, The Collection Schizophrenias (Graywolf Press, February 2019), choosing what to share when writing about our personal...
View ArticleThe Language of Grief: Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li
Some narrators are eager to reveal themselves and welcome the reader into their lives; others take their time, and it’s only after completing the last page, sometimes with a deep sigh, that the reader...
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A Year in Rumpus Book Reviews
In her review of Stephanie Strickland’s How the Universe Is Made, Rumpus contributor and book reviewer Julie Marie Wade writes: A review, after all, isn’t a book report (mostly summative) or an...
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Collisions and Dissonance: Talking with Lynn Steger Strong
Lynn Steger Strong’s second novel, Want, follows our almost-unnamed protagonist, a sometimes-high school teacher and adjunct professor, as her life unravels. She goes to museums, reads books, anxiously...
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Writing What Bothers: A Conversation with Frances Cha
Frances Cha’s debut novel If I Had Your Face follows the adjacent and intertwined—but also very dissimilar–lives of four (arguably five) protagonists. The women share superficial similarities: they’re...
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Notable Online: 3/14–3/20
Sunday 3/14: Kazuo Ishiguro presents Klara and the Sun. Book Passage via Zoom, 1 p.m. PDT, $35. Rebecca Morgan Frank reads poetry with the Open Mouth Readings. Zoom, 7 p.m. CDT, free. Monday 3/15:...
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The Art of Striving to Convince: A Conversation with Elizabeth McCracken
Elizabeth McCracken says this might have been a book of water stories. At some point during the time she was assembling this collection she realized there were quite a few stories about middle-aged...
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