The Price of Acceptance
I knew my mother would be surprised. I didn’t know she’d be horrified.
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Posts Tagged: britain
Reading across Cultures: A Conversation with Ratika Kapur
Ratika Kapur discusses her latest book, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, the disappointing romance of affairs, and how people carry on after doing the unthinkable.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jon Day
Jon Day discusses his memoir, Cyclogeography: Journeys of a London Bicycle Courier, the bicycle as a symbol of gentrification, and the city as “a technology for living.”
...moreRoald Dahl’s Hidden Village Home
Take a stroll through the storybook town of Great Missenden, a tiny village in the county of Buckinghamshire in Britain, and the home of children’s literature’s grand-wizard, Roald Dahl, in the latter half of his life. For Hazlitt, Michael Hingston tours Great Missenden and reflects on the similarities between the little town and the settings […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Dan Dalton over at BuzzFeed sleeps in the Airbnb bookshop. Britain’s Waterstones is giving up on ebooks and outsourcing digital titles to the Japanese service Kobo. A store in Mumbai Central Station in India has been going strong for more than 135 years.
...morePoet Tripping
Carol Ann Duffy, the UK’s poet laureate, has invited three poets to join her on a road trip through England, Wales and Scotland, which will take them from Falmouth to St Andrews over the course of a fortnight. From June 19 to July 2, Gillian Clarke, the outgoing national poet of Wales, the makar (the […]
...moreNational Amnesia
Race is an important and central issue in the United States, but what about abroad? It appears that both the United States and the United Kingdom are witnessing one of those moments when we confront what Toni Morrison said in an early interview about Beloved (1987), ‘something that the characters don’t want to remember, I […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Derek Ridgers
British photographer Derek Ridgers discusses his fetish for nightclub portraits and what it’s been like to shoot the London underground scene for nearly four decades.
...moreWhy You Should Read the Comments
A profile of classicist Mary Beard at The New Yorker describes how Beard’s career in Britain brought her into the public eye. Beard gave a well-known lecture titled “Oh Do Shut Up Dear!” about how women (in literature and in life) have been silenced throughout history. More recently, she has received attention for confronting Internet […]
...moreBrown Bag Your American Literature, Quick
Michael Gove, Britain’s Education Secretary, is rewriting Britain’s public school curriculum to be more British. To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, and The Crucible are among the titles being dropped from required reading lists. “I put this in the context of what’s going on in Europe and the world at large, which is […]
...moreUK Prisoners Denied Books
MobyLives reports that British prisons have banned books sent as gifts, a right even allowed in notorious Guantanamo Bay. Many British authors have criticized the new policy—an online petition has collected more than 20,000 signatures. Even prison staff seem to think the policy is a bad idea. Prison Minister Jeremy Wright has defended the decision, saying […]
...moreWritten Roots
Alexandra Fuller’s third memoir, Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, turns the spotlight on her mother—”a broken, splendid, fierce mother.”
...morePolitics Sunday
Is it just me, or does it feel like everything is about to explode? Last night in San Francisco, there were a gazillion riot cops for a few anarchists who took over a school and may or may not have smashed a Wells Fargo. I said, “What? They need a million cops for a few […]
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
This week, the book blogs are scaring the ever-loving Jesus out of me. Sure, there have been a few fun, interesting updates and interviews, but most of what they’ve been saying makes me want to build a series of tunnels in and around my house so that I can start planning the first push of […]
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