RaveThe Rumpus...Khakpour is unflinching, not escapist: nakedly honest upon the page, neither hiding nor justifying her choices ... Khakpour gathers that courage, again and again, as she reaches into the most painful parts of her life, excavates them, and holds them up to the light. Khakpour’s writing also shreds the flat stereotypes of illness. The sick are often shown as angelic in their illness; repentant, like somehow, they deserve it; transcendent, like their pain elevates them to a different plane; near-corpses stripped of contact with reality. Khakpour presents no angels, no penance, no transcendence. She insists on context, as each of her intersecting identities impacts what it means to be ill ... Reading this book plunges readers into the embodied, visceral truth of sickness. The ill body is not a home: it is pain, a trap ... The kaleidoscopic range of Khakpour’s life with illness—how she has grappled with it, and how it has grappled with her—is this memoir’s offering.
Lauren Groff
RaveThe RumpusFlorida is no less ambitious, but here Groff is subtler, prowling like the panther paused on the book’s cover ... So seductive and self-contained is Groff’s writing that any metaphor or explanation for how the words and ideas of this collection move already exist in the book itself. The short stories in Florida are like specimens in a greenhouse—carefully pruned and curated ... Her writing houses slow, grinding alterations of ecology, attending to encroaching, peripheral things. It speaks about emotional resonance. It regards the intimate dystopias that smolder in the present, close enough to touch ... She is this particular with every aspect of language, not just names. The sentence is Groff’s most fertile ground. At each turn, she crafts meticulous images and descriptions of sensation that spread through the reader \'like ink through water.\'
Olga Tokarczuk, Trans. by Jennifer Croft
PositiveThe Rumpus...a constellation novel of over one hundred story fragments ... Through this unorthodox structure, Flights gives a form to motion ... A book like that, like Flights, is something new every time you come to it. It shifts its face, opens up an altered way of seeing, keeps your thoughts in motion ... And so, rather than ending, the book thrusts forward, closing on a scene of someone’s travels beginning.
