an interview by Aileen Keown Vaux for therumpus.net Once in a great while, a novelist comes along with the ability to dazzle the crowd with their own taxonomy-defying creation. In her debut novel, Fire Season, Leyna Krow deftly weaves together elements of magical realism, historical fiction, and traditional westerns to make something so much greater than …
BY ALEX BEHR May 18th, 2020 on The Rumpus.net https://therumpus.net/2020/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-ramiza-shamoun-koya/ The Royal Abduls, Ramiza Shamoun Koya’s debut novel (Forest Avenue Press, December 2019), drops us into a Muslim American family twisted by generational expectations and self-doubt. It’s told in shifting views by Amina Abdul, an evolutionary biologist who’s returned to Washington, DC to be closer …
“I have always been one to take notes. Whether I’m driving in a car, sitting in a bar, watching a movie, reading a book, a pen is never far from the hand. In those days I wrote often in pocket-sized moleskin notebooks. I filled dozens and dozens of them with sentences I admired, research unearthed, …
I’ve been asked a handful of times in the last couple of weeks: “How do you know Cheryl Strayed?” Here’s the short version, spoken by Cheryl: “In some interesting way it was your mother who brought us together, through my mother. They were the original contact. I wrote in The Sun about how much I …
Hey, all you Dear Sugar fans and all you fans of Portland author Cheryl Strayed! We’re happy to report that they’re one in the same. Strayed came out as The Rumpus’s beloved advice columnist Sugar yesterday at a party in San Francisco—just a month before the publication of her memoir Wild (check out Strayed’s video …
The Rumpus just posted a great review of The Wilding, by Benjamin Percy, a book that’s also on our radar, because it is set in Bend, Oregon. The review, by Joseph Michael Owens, an MFA student at the University of Nebraska, is a true rave, in the best sense. Here is just one paragraph from the …
“Bookavore” works for an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, New York. She recently read one of the 2010 Book Award winners from the independent bookstores of the Pacific Northwest, The Big Burn by Timothy Egan, and gave it a rave review. Gotta love her style! Note, too, Bookavore’s honorable mention at the end of her column …
