The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Andrew Bertaina
“Life is incredibly sad, but it’s also funny, joyful, wonderful, and strange.”
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Posts Tagged: Borges
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Heather McHugh
Heather McHugh discusses her new poetry collection, MUDDY MATTERHORN.
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That Constant Movement: A Conversation with Luis Othoniel Rosa
Luis Othoniel Rosa discusses his novel, DOWN WITH GARGAMEL!.
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A New Version of Possibility: Talking with Juliana Delgado Lopera
Juliana Delgado Lopera discusses their new novel, FIEBRE TROPICAL.
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The Rumpus Interview with Adam Morris
Adam Morris discusses Quiet Creature on the Corner, a novel he translated from the Brazilian by João Gilberto Noll, the choices he makes as a translator, and the unique narrative structure of Noll’s writing.
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The Lonely Voice #32: The Last Lonely Voice
That’s what the Lonely Voice has always been to me. It was a privilege to be allowed to have a private conversation with myself in public.
...moreStructure as Lightning Rod
Writing for The Millions, M.C. Mah turns over all the cards in the deck on structure in storytelling. He gathers words of wisdom—and many metaphors—from luminaries like John McPhee, Borges, Vonnegut, and George Saunders, and then links the contemporary “horoscopic style” of structuring to an “anxiety about a better way to tell a story…” possibly […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his new collection Insurrections, creating a fictional town, and the pressure to make religious decisions during puberty.
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The Rumpus interview with Stuart Dybek
Stuart Dybek discusses the forthcoming The Best Small Fictions 2016, the invisibility of anecdote, and why the art of transition is the art of the short story.
...moreCelebrating Borges’s Dual Natures
Maybe there are two Borges in the world, existing at the same time. One is the fiction writer we know, the lover of paradox, the trickster, the forger, the artist who describes fantastical events with straight-faced authority, using the syntax and tone of academia; and then there is this other Borges, the critic, who writes reasonably and […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Lincoln Michel
Lincoln Michel talks about his debut short story collection, Upright Beasts, his interest in monsters, and what sources of culture outside of literature inspire him.
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The Rumpus Interview with David Lipsky
David Lipsky, whose book was recently adapted into the movie The End of the Tour, discusses his career as a writer and journalist as it’s evolved in the twenty years since his road trip with David Foster Wallace.
...moreIs Writing Useless?
My compulsion to write does not occlude the uselessness of filling pages with words. I know that what I do is pointless, one more message in a bottle in a moment when everyone else around me is also casting messages adrift. In an essay for Gorse, Fernando Sdrigotti writes about how the act of writing is pointless and […]
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My Evenings Reading Alone
For nearly ten years I had lain beside him: the snoring was a blow, but, looking back, it was also a necessary portent, an etch in our story, the fuzzy spot on a picture frame you can’t tell is from the photograph aging or a fingerprint that left its caressing mark on the glass.
...moreI Am the Modern Man
A new website called Poetry for Robots seeks to find out whether robots can learn human poetic language. It was inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’s theory that despite humanity’s near-infinite capacity for creating distinct metaphors, we still use the same ones over and over again in literature, like comparing eyes to the stars. The website […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Paul Griner
Paul Griner talks about his newest novel, Second Life, his just-released story collection Hurry Please I Want to Know, putting real life into fiction, and whether creative writing can be taught.
...moreReading Between the Lines
Here is what I mean by meta-fiction: all these books, stories, and bodies of work contain made-up books and bodies of work. Some are based on real books. Some are making fun of real books, a little bit, gently. Some are invented entirely. And one, you can go out and buy. Hint: it’s not Don […]
...moreThe Original Copycat
Tim Youd has recently undertaken the task of reproducing Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, but the Guardian says the idea of copying classic novels is not so original; Pierre Menard, a character in a Borges story, did it first: Although the words themselves were exactly the same, Pierre Menard’s fragmentary Quixote was judged to be “subtler than that […]
...moreLetting Them Go
Down at the Atlantic, Nathaniel Rich touches on Kazuo Ishiguro, memory, and literature’s Borgesian debts: The answer, as most readers will intuitively conclude, lies between two extremes. Forget everything and you lose your soul; remember everything and you lose the ability to forgive. Ishiguro’s characters, like all of us, are caught between the bliss of ignorance […]
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This Week in Short Fiction: Thus Were Their Faces by Silvina Ocampo
Probably more than anything else, sheer curiosity propels readers through [Silvina Ocampo’s] stories.
...moreThe Fantastic Joseph Conrad
In honor of Joseph Conrad’s birthday on December 3, the Paris Review blog posted Conrad’s author’s note to The Shadow Line, which ruminates on marvels and mysteries.
...moreSong of the Day: “The Singing Tree”
According to the experimental folk artist Mike Cooper, there is a tree in Almuñécar, in Southern Spain, that used to attract hundreds of birds. It inspired him to write the “avante folk” song “The Singing Tree,” off his recently reissued double album Places I Know/The Machine Gun Co. The funky organ that permeates the song alludes to a […]
...moreForeign and Apart
BOMB Magazine’s gotten a hold of Valeria Luiselli, and it’s really a treat to behold; asked about the fluidity of fiction in her essays, her response was more than candid: Well, that’s the whole point; there are no rules in fiction even if creative writing programs everywhere have tried to make people believe there are. […]
...moreBorges and Sartre at the Movies
Turns out that both Jorge Luis Borges and Jean-Paul Sartre reviewed Orson Welles’s masterpiece Citizen Kane, and neither of them particularly cared for the film. Needless to say, the director didn’t take this very well. Head over to the Paris Review to read both of the writers’ critiques of the movie, and Welles’s response.
...moreDon’t Invite Borges to Your World Cup Party
As the World Cup continues, everyone seems to be a soccer fan. One person who wasn’t? Jorge Luis Borges. According to The New Republic, the famed Argentine writer loathed the game, going so far as to purposefully schedule a lecture at the same time as Argentina’s first match in the 1978 World Cup. Even if […]
...moreThe other other Borges
“The other one, the one called Borges, is the one who skates at the Place de la Concorde on blocks of ice.” A D Jameson at HTMLGiant satirizes Jorge Luis Borges’s short piece “Borges And I” while imagining an explanation for a poster allegedly of Borges skating around Paris in the summer. He even competes with […]
...moreStuck Between Two Impossible Libraries
“Every librarian, every book collector, finds him or herself between these two mythical places—the Perfect Library of God and the Infinite Library of Babel, the one transcribed by Jerome, the other by Borges.” At Lapham’s Quarterly, a beautiful meditation on libraries, God, St. Jerome and Borges — and at the same a pithy diagnosis of […]
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