Reality Scooped: Talking with Tony Tulathimutte
Recent Whiting Award winner Tony Tulathimutte discusses his first novel, Private Citizens, the state of satire in 2017, “booby-trapping” identity politics, and productivity in the Internet age.
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Posts Tagged: Believer
The Pain and Poetry of Fame
…because the role-model pressure becomes so insane, the personal and private takes a backseat to whatever it takes to maintain that fame and to maintain that lifestyle, and before you know it you’re not a human being anymore. The Believer Logger has an interview with poet and actress, Amber Tamblyn, whose latest book explores the […]
...moreCharacters Aren’t the Enemy
I’ll admit that I was so into sentence construction when I started working with Amy that I had zero interest in character development. Hempel subtly persuaded me, partially through introducing me to radical prose stylists who also care about their characters, that pathos in fiction is not an outmoded concept and is not the enemy […]
...moreShame and Shamelessness
I’m more interested in someone like…Allen Ginsberg…people who are shameless because they have a sense of shame. What they’re really trying to do is to change the face of shame itself. Ginsberg was an ethical person, but he grew up ashamed of his mother’s insanity and ashamed of his own sexuality. And what he managed […]
...moreThe Girl Canon
Those Boy Canon books were the ones that I read throughout the years I was in high school. And, let me make clear, I have no end of affection for those books…The problem, in hindsight, was that those books helped me understand what it must mean to be a young man, and very little about […]
...moreWord of the Day: Periculous
(adj.); dangerous or full of peril; from the latin periculum (“an attempt, risk”) I’m normal. I live in a nice apartment. I think one thing [guys like Burroughs] didn’t have that I have is the Internet. The Internet is the biggest conduit of psychic violence since television. –Blake Butler, in an interview with The Believer […]
...moreThe Invisible in Morocco
As a homosexual in Morocco I think that you understand very early that there’s no protection and that no one will defend you. If someone takes your arm and wants to have sex with you, it’s a kind of rape, but you can’t scream or tell you parents because they’ll just say that it was […]
...more“Short Attention Span is the New Avant-Garde”
In the final installment of its “What Would Twitter Do?” series, The Believer talks to MoMA Poet Laureate Kenneth Goldsmith about how he views Twitter and its relationship to writing.
...moreBeliever Now Accepting Classifieds
Say you want to rant somewhere it’ll be seen. Or send a love letter, publicly. Or write short, realistic fiction in the form of ads about how your grandmother has been captured by neo-Nazi zombies demanding a large vat of non-kosher, organ-based meats in return for her safety. The Believer’s opening up a new classifieds […]
...moreThe Modern War Novel
As modern warfare has changed, so has the war novel. The Believer’s blog has an interview with author Aaron Gwyn, where he discusses his latest novel and the changing reality of the American soldier: Drone operators in the American Southwest pull the triggers that send Hellfire missiles into Taliban camps, then leave work, and go […]
...moreLast of the Radical Filmmakers
The Believer blog has a great interview with avant-garde filmmaker Nina Menkes. Menkes provides some insight into her creative process, as well as her take on being a feminist filmmaker: I am surely a feminist filmmaker, but not because I set out to become one, or am trying to make any kind of statement. Rather, […]
...moreTwitter, Unplugged
Writing from Turkey, a country that temporarily unplugged Twitter to quell government protests, novelist and essayist Kaya Genç describes the experience of disconnecting from the service. Instead of the liberation he expected, the lack of Twitter left him feeling like a prisoner in solitary confinement: On my third day without Twitter, however, I realized that I […]
...more“I was young just minutes ago”
The latest issue of The Believer features an excellent interview with Maurice Sendak, conducted before his death in May. And because they are very, very nice people they’ve made it available online. Talk about quote-ables, this one’s full of ’em. If you don’t print it out and put it up on the fridge with little red lines underlining your […]
...moreWhat’s The Lifespan of a Fact?
Go behind the fact-checking scenes with this email exchange between Believer fact-checker and writer.
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