The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #165: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
“The opposite of nostalgia is truth.”
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Posts Tagged: AIDS
Rumpus Exclusive: “Too Sexy”
I am not coked out of my mind, I’m coked into my mind.
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The Inadvertent Postmodernist: A Conversation with Sarah Schulman
Author and activist Sarah Schulman discusses her forthcoming novel, MAGGIE TERRY.
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Lessons from a Life: Alexander Chee’s How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
[T]he effect of reading Chee’s essays is to be reminded of why we write, but also, why we read, even in these times of never-ending distress.
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The Real People: A Conversation with Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai discusses her forthcoming third novel, The Great Believers, how she arrived at the book’s structure, and the story and its characters.
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Like Juggling Knives: Talking with Rumaan Alam
Rumaan Alam discusses his new novel, That Kind of Mother, the limits of the employer-employee relationship, and the grossness of heterosexual sex.
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Moving Toward Answers: A Conversation with Stephen Mills
Poet Stephen Mills discusses his first two collections, He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices and A History of the Unmarried, teaching writing, and what’s next.
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A Life of Words: A Conversation with Chip Livingston
Chip Livingston discusses his new novel, Owls Don’t Have to Mean Death, his move to Uruguay, his writing life, and the significance of owls.
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A Deeply Human Act: Don’t Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
What is so extraordinary about this collection is its lyricism, its humanity, and its urgency.
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Death, Satan, and Cats: A Conversation with Rabih Alameddine
Rabih Alameddine discusses his newest novel, The Angel of History, surviving the AIDS epidemic, and the role of religion in his life and writing.
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A Magpie for the Lord
What would it be like to not be us? We were trying to figure out so much about the world then, and this is something we could never get to the bottom of.
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The Gate of Permission: A Conversation with Victoria Redel
Victoria Redel discusses her newest novel, Before Everything, living through and beyond grief, and why she loves secrets.
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Just Chaste Me
The more first-time stories I heard, the longer I was willing to wait.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #25: Are You Now, or Have You Ever Been, a Success?
In America, everybody, it seems, wants to be a success. Me, too. Recently, I confided to a family member that sometimes, in moments of deep despair (fortunately they are fairly uncommon), I find myself contemplating suicide as the most sensible retirement plan. The road ahead, paved with potholes and poverty, sometimes doesn’t look all that […]
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #21: Not Yesterday’s Demonstrations
1972: War was waging in Vietnam and kids were coming home in boxes. Hippes and yippies went clean for Gene McCarthy, but George McGovern won the democratic nomination. Tricky Dick Nixon was the one for the Republicans and the so-called Silent Majority. I was a sixteen-year-old runaway revolutionary of peace and love, living in a commune, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Naomi Jackson
Naomi Jackson discusses her debut novel, The Star Side of Bird Hill, how she approached writing about mental illness and its affects on a family, and choosing to to tell a story from multiple perspectives.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: I Died of Dysentery
The glorious ways we fifth graders died in Mr. Mosher’s computer class. We strove to die in the most imaginable permutations possible.
...moreThis Week In Indie Bookstores
A New Paltz, New York bookstore with an anti-Trump sign is fighting a ban against it. An Egyptian bookstore has a “scream room” where customers can scream as loudly as they like. With the Gilmore Girls revival only a month a way, there’s a hypothesis that Jess might own a Stars Hollow Bookstore. Christian bookstore chain […]
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 2): “Ave Maria”
Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Surprising the Psychic
Coming up Swords, a Nine: nightmares and anguish; the Ten: rock bottom; and Death: with her audible reminder the card was in “the place you are now.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Annie DeWitt
Annie DeWitt discusses her debut novel, White Nights in Split Town City, the 90s, and the brutality of nature.
...moreReading Between the Lines
Life, the book. The long gay book. / Do you remember? Should you remember? / What are our stories about? In an essay for Lit Hub, Matthew Cheney narrates growing up during the AIDS crisis, and the intertwined relationships between his identity, the plays he clung to, the books he coveted, and the ghostly presences […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Jamie Brickhouse
Jamie Brickhouse discusses Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir of Booze, Sex, and My Mother, a memoir that chronicles his intimate, near-fatal journey through alcoholism, and living HIV positive.
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The Rumpus Interview with Janice Erlbaum
Janice Erlbaum talks about her new novel, I, Liar, how writing memoir compares to writing fiction, homelessness in America, and Munchausen syndrome and Borderline Personality Disorder.
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #10: Remember AIDS?
AIDS isn’t over, but far too many think it is. Not everyone is haunted by remembering the dying, the friends gone gaunt, the lesions appearing, the artists dropping out of sight, the funerals, the lie-filled obituaries, the terrified waits for results of blood tests taken by nurses wearing masks and triple gloves.
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Michael Broder
If I am a sub poet, is poetry as a genre my dom? Is the particular poem I’m working on my dom?
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A Clean Break
I needed not to love poetry anymore, needed not to miss having loved poetry.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Forgiving my Father, the Serial Rapist
This bit of vital truth to the story of how I came to be came like a puncture—strong, sharp, and sudden.
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Yearbook #2: Alysia Abbott
In Yearbook #2, Alysia Abbott talks about her memoir Fairyland, a storytelling and community project for children of parents who died of AIDS, and how upsetting is can be to pour through old journals.
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The Rumpus Interview with Kara Richardson Whitely
Author Kara Richardson Whitely discusses her new memoir, Gorge: My Journey Up Kilimanjaro at 300 Pounds, surviving food addiction and the trauma of being molested, and what comes next.
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