Cervantes
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #153: Julie Schumacher
“I have to confess here that I never studied Shakespeare in college.”
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #2: In a World Gone Tilt-a-Whirl
Society is falling apart, the daily news seems to say. Living in interesting times, it is all too easy to fear that our work is meaningless.
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Autofiction and Empathy
Reading novels breaks down the boundary between “me” and “not me.” Over at the Atlantic, Nicholas Dames writes about a deeply worrying feeling that contemporary fiction isn’t living up to Cervantes’s standards, opting for nihilistic individualism rather than empathy.
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Baffling Perfection
The business of classics being perfect books is baloney. They are as defective, as inadequate as everything else in the universe. Careful readers see these flaws as reflections of their own frailty. Ilan Stavans, a man known for his love…
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Burying Cervantes
On a quest to determine if Don Quixote author Miguel de Cervantes died of cirrhosis of the liver, a Spanish forensic team uncovered seventeen bodies buried between 1612 and 1630 in Madrid’s Church of the Trinity, one of which was believed…
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Missing Bones Found
Back in 2012, Electric Literature featured a piece about the search for the remains of Miguel de Cervantes, author of Don Quixote. Now scientists in Spain say they’ve found his bones.
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The Original Copycat
Tim Youd has recently undertaken the task of reproducing Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, but the Guardian says the idea of copying classic novels is not so original; Pierre Menard, a character in a Borges story, did it first: Although the words themselves…
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Searching for Cervantes
After a Times article last March criticized Spain (and its literary establishment) for failing to unravel the mystery of the precise location of Miguel de Cervantes’s grave, a reinvigorated search may have finally yielded results. Cervantes was buried in Madrid’s…
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A Literary Bone Hunt
Ever wonder what happened to author of Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’ bones? So have a bunch of historians and archaeologists. They’ve been trying to track them down, hoping to reveal whether there is any veracity in the rumors that…
