Posts by author

Suzanne Koven

  • The Big Idea: Oliver Sacks

    To celebrate his 80th birthday, The Rumpus sits down with neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks to discuss his latest book, Hallucinations, and the relationship between hallucinatory experiences and the imagination and creativity.

  • The Big Idea: Eve Ensler

    Writer, journalist, activist, and lifelong feminist Eve Ensler talks with Suzanne Koven and explores the body’s relationship to the desecration of the earth, the importance of listening to the “real” in ourselves, and how it feels to be known as…

  • The Big Idea: Gish Jen

    “The Big Idea” features interviews with people whose lights stay on—writers, artists, scientists, activists, and others who take a long and broad view of an issue, problem, or concept, and pursue it over many years.

  • The Big Idea: Andrew Solomon

    Writer and journalist Andrew Solomon talks about parent-child differences, and the eleven-year process of writing his latest book, which profiles families of deaf, dwarf, autistic, severely disabled, transgendered, schizophrenic, and other marginalized children.

  • The Big Idea: Dr. Neal Barnard

    Dr. Neal Barnard, who has advocated for animal protection and veganism for the past thirty years, discusses what motivates people to adopt veganism, the idea that humans are natural carnivores, and what’s really involved in producing animal-derived food.

  • Interpreting My Malady

    The unpublished catalogue of fiction inspired by illness is limitless, composed every day, at every hour, in every hospital, clinic, hospice, and bedroom where the ill and injured and even the mildly indisposed attempt to make sense of our altered…

  • Politics in the Exam Room

    In the fall of 2008 I was chatting with a woman I know about the upcoming presidential election. She was in her 60s, single, a funky dresser, world traveler, and amateur artist—what my mom would have called a “free-spirited Auntie…