Reading Ferlinghetti in the Age of Trump
This lesson feels especially relevant to our moment: that it’s possible to be both a frustrated activist and also a present and joyful human being.
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Posts Tagged: Iraq War
Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Julia Stoops’s Parts Per Million
Kashan stares out at the crowd. “Saddam was hard. This is also hard.”
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TORCH: An Alien, Ineligible for Participation
That a bumbling demagogue would be able to take this institutional racism and weaponize it is, then, not really a surprise. The seeds for this hate were planted a long time ago.
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Libraries Are the Real Punk Rock
Maybe I was only in the eighth grade, but I was ready to stand up to anyone who tried to threaten the ideal of intellectual freedom.
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There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
As Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means.
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Home Is Here
There is no singular Muslim story, no definitive identity for the entire religion. […] Here, four women discuss what it’s like to be a minority in America in 2017, post-9/11 and post-Trump.
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Unbridled Power in All Its Majestic Terror: Will Bardenwerper’s The Prisoner in His Palace
As we begin our own Age of the Strongman, Hussein’s almost effortless manipulation—of soldiers expecting exactly that behavior—shows how susceptible we all might be to the sheer force of a big personality.
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The Mirror’s Shards
In the face of colossal and destructive political lies, we need a more nuanced understanding of the world than simply truth versus lie.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Micah Perks
Micah Perks talks about her new novel, What Becomes Us, America’s cultural and mythical heritage, and why every novel is a political novel.
...moreThis Week in Books: Civilianized: A Young Veteran’s Memoir
Welcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Whitney Terrell
Whitney Terrell discusses war, gender, and fiction vs. reality in his new novel, The Good Lieutenant, about a female soldier in Iraq.
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The Rumpus Interview with Garrard Conley
Garrard Conley, author of the new memoir Boy Erased, discusses growing up in the deep South, mothers, writing for change, and political delusions.
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War Narratives #6: The Rumpus Interview with Phil Klay
When you’re writing fiction, you can follow your own ignorance. You can write something and realize how flawed you are.
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War Narratives #5: Surge
But those who subscribe to the Surge narrative have to work very hard to choose and order their supporting facts.
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War Narratives #4: Meet the Civilians
Each character achieves independence in his own way, but independence winds up looking a lot like loneliness.
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War Narratives #3: The Rumpus Interview with Matt Gallagher
Matt Gallagher on blogging during his time in the Army, his memoir Kaboom and forthcoming novel Youngblood, and what makes for good literary fiction about wartime.
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War Narratives #2: Trauma Writing
[I]f we don’t explore wartime trauma in literature, we will never understand war’s impact in personal or social terms; never understand the incredible variety of responses to trauma, with all its nuances and exceptions.
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Rapid Fire
Stanton re-gathered himself, still wearing a smile after being shot in the face, and went back to work.
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The Rumpus Interview with Elliot Ackerman
Elliot Ackerman discusses his debut novel Green on Blue, fighting with the Marine Corps in the Second Battle of Fallujah, and being labeled as a journalist .
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Tom Sleigh
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Tom Sleigh about his new book, Station Zed,, how reportage and the surreal can combine inside a poem, and secularizing the mysteries of death, redemption, and resurrection.
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The Rumpus Interview with Brian Turner
Brian Turner discusses his new memoir, My Life as a Foreign Country, the Iraq War, poetry and prose, and his family’s long history of serving in the military.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
On Wednesday evening, Phil Klay’s Redeployment won the National Book Award for fiction, making it the first short story collection to win the award since Andrea Barrett’s Ship Fever in 1996. That’s 18 years. But what’s maybe more startling is that the collection, which takes multiple perspectives of people involved in and returning from the […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Fiction: Chips
Emily Gray Tedrowe, author of the forthcoming novel Blue Stars, exploring the complexities of the Iraq War through the families left behind, debuts a powerful new story set in Iraq.
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X. My Soldier, Iraq, and Contract Marriage
The incinerator burned amputated body parts. It sat immediately next to the barracks in Baghdad.
...moreThe Iraq War in Fiction
“Fiction is, of course, serving rearguard here; the last decade has seen Iraq War films, poetry collections, documentaries, and non-fiction books too numerous to list, but part of what’s appealing about examining American Iraq War fiction now is that there isn’t that much yet. A common perspective unites this early wave of American Iraq War […]
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Readers Report: Magic
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Magic.”
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Albums of Our Lives: Moxy Früvous’s Bargainville
What did I turn to when I needed to channel my frustration with this corporatized Republican state against which I could only kick my small angry feet? The music of Gen-Xers from another country.
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First-Class Guilt
But I had deployed only once to Iraq. When so many others, including friends of mine, had suffered two, three, four, five, or more deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, why should I be the one enjoying the comfort of flying first-class?
...more“Do Take Every Opportunity to Tell ‘The Army Story'”
“Here are some of the things you need to know.” Gooding handed Pilley a card, laminated to slip smoothly into and out of his wallet, with a bulleted list of do’s and don’ts. Pilley stared at the card like it had the answers to the algebra final exam. He licked his white lips and coughed […]
...moreAn Internet Revolutionary
Julian Assange may have more sidekicks than we know of. You can read about how Bradley Manning, a gender-questioning soldier, came to subvert the American military’s authority over information regarding the war in Iraq. He has simultaneously earned the title of WikiLeaks hero and U.S. traitor, on account of the classified information he leaked over […]
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