Both Microscope and Telescope: The Absurd Man by Major Jackson
The Absurd Man is confident and daring with a muscular specificity of language that is both deeply resonant for a wide audience and also singular to the poet.
...more
Posts Tagged: albert camus
Flesh and Blood: A Conversation with Oksana Zabuzhko
Oksana Zabuzhko discusses her story collection, YOUR AD COULD GO HERE.
...more
Just Do Something: Talking with Sam Farahmand
Sam Farahmand discusses his debut novel, CHIMERO.
...more
HORN! REVIEWS: The Stranger
…his was the darkest timeline, but he’d live it all over again.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #139: Debra Jo Immergut
“If the door doesn’t open, it’s okay to walk away, give your poor head a rest. And try again later.”
...more
At the Intersection of Personal and Political: Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now edited by Amit Majmudar
American writers have a long, distinguished history of calling out injustice.
...more
What to Read When the World Is Unreliable
Instead of sorting through all the crazy news stories this weekend, we suggest taking a break with some unreliable narrators in a few far more worthwhile novels.
...moreThe Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #56: Patricia Engel
I met one of my favorite writers before she ever published a single story. We were classmates vying for our MFAs in Creative Writing from Florida International University and would smile at each other from across the room. She was shy, but never defensive, in workshop and always strove, really made the effort, to answer […]
...moreA Productive Unhappiness
Why is it that knowing how to remain alone in Paris for a year in a miserable room teaches a man more than a hundred literary salons and forty years’ experience of ‘Parisian life’? Over at the Paris Review Daily, Alice Kaplan, author of the new biography Looking for the Stranger, writes about Albert Camus’s […]
...moreThe Crisis of Man
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Robert Zaretsky writes about Albert Camus’s one and only visit to the United States, to New York City, and how the questions of absurdity, meaning, and rebellion Camus’s visit raised for him still cut as deeply now as they did seventy years ago.
...more
The Last Book I Loved: Sheila Levine Is Dead and Living In New York
But when my loneliness feels as vast—and capable of drowning me—as the sea, this book about self-destruction comforts me more than any self-help.
...moreCamus And Orwell’s Hypothetical Coffee Date
In 1945 George Orwell was scheduled to meet Albert Camus at a café in Paris. However, Camus became ill and the two authors never met. Now, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Matthew Lamb speculates what might have happened had the two actually had the opportunity to speak. With the help of the authors’ biographies, Lamb […]
...moreBeing Plagued
In a quest for meaning, NPR compares the Ebola epidemic to Albert Camus’s The Plague. The Plague doesn’t have a happy ending, of course, though it’s not quite as hopeless as you might think. Initially, Dr. Rieux is a little resigned to the disease that’s threatening his city: “One hardly knows what a dead man is, […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Craig Nova
Powerhouse novelist Craig Nova discusses his newest work, the terrors of the universe, the solaces of fiction, and his influences, from Albert Camus to Alice Munro.
...moreExistential Ménage-à-Trois
Andy Martin, author of The Boxer and the Goalkeeper, writes about the woman called Wanda who ended the “bromance” between Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. “Camus was the new kid on the block, confronted by the great metropolitan circle of critics and publishers and philosophers around Sartre – and yet he could score over the master with […]
...more“The memoir of literary obsession”
Over at New York, Sam Anderson has a review of Elizabeth Hawes’ Camus, a Romance in which he identifies the genre “memoir of literary obsession.” I’d never thought of this as a genre, but it’s clearly an important one, most notably because all fans of reading at some point have to come to the crushing […]
...more