What’s Between the Covers: A Conversation with Naben Ruthnum
Naben Ruthnum discusses CURRY: EATING, READING, AND RACE and FIND YOU IN THE DARK.
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Posts Tagged: Camus
Yes, and: Simulacra by Airea D. Matthews
Matthews is a poet of multivalent ways and hows, an artist at home in the riddle of refusal.
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An Erasure of Distance: Traveling in Circles with Nathan Englander
Nathan Englander talks about his new novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, the experience of being interviewed, and why he believes books can save lives.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Danzy Senna
Danzy Senna discusses New People, inhabiting her characters without judging them, playing with the reality and surreality of identity, and pushing against traditional story arcs.
...moreHow Albert Camus Wrote a French Classic
Kamel Daoud’s The Mersault Investigation catapulted Albert Camus’s The Stranger into the center of conversation in many literary circles. After helping get Camus’s Algerian Chronicles published in English in 2013, Alice Kaplan’s latest effort, Looking For The Stranger, explains how the book came to be. Camus expert and Los Angeles Review of Books History Editor […]
...moreA Spirit of Rebellion
Maddie Crum interviews Jacques Ferrandez, who adapted Albert Camus’s classic The Stranger into a graphic novel, on the importance of The Stranger, his personal connection to it, and more: The book is about the human condition and also about youth. Camus used to describe Meursault as someone who does not know how to lie. Each […]
...moreLeduc Revisited
To write is to be liberate oneself. Untrue. To write is to change nothing. Writing for the Guardian, Rafia Zakaria tells us about Violette Leduc: discovered by Simone de Beauvoir and published by Albert Camus, Leduc, the sexually explicit lesbian feminist, was largely unread even in her prime though has always been critically hailed, and […]
...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.
...moreSearching for a Self
If a link falls on the Internet and no one is online to click it, does it really make a connection? Michael Seidlinger takes on the Sisyphean task of building identity in cyberspace: We have all become Sisyphus, pushing our rocks up a hill littered with hyperlinks and tweets, perpetually, futilely, refreshing the page of […]
...moreExistential Black Magic
Desperate stuff, all about sex. Some fella called Simon de Beaver. It’s called existentialism. The Independent’s John Walsh sat down to interview Sarah Bakewell about At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, her book about the lives, influences, and impact of that wacky French bunch, the Existentialists.
...moreSaving Our Minds
At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reviews Albert Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays, and suggests works by Nietzsche and Susan Sontag to read alongside Camus’s eye- and mind-opening work: If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate its strength and wonder. Our world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Michael Seidlinger
The Publisher-in-Chief of Civil Coping Mechanisms and Book Reviews Editor for Electric Literature talks about his newest novel, The Strangest.
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The Rumpus Interview with Christian Wiman
Poet and essayist Christian Wiman discusses landscape, elegy, and the strain between doubt and belief.
...moreLiterature as Ideal Propaganda
During the Cold War, the CIA viewed literature as a potent tool to undermine the Soviet Union. Novels by George Orwell, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce were smuggled across borders. And, as Nick Romeo explains in the Atlantic, the CIA sought authentic works for its purposes. Doctor Zhivago, hardly a celebration of capitalism, […]
...moreHow Did Albert Camus Really Die?
There is a new theory displacing the old view of Albert Camus’ death by car crash. The French philosopher, author and Nobel Prize winner was traveling with his publisher, Michel Gallimard, when they crashed into a tree in 1960, with his unfinished novel in tow. “The tragedy shocked and saddened France. But no one imagined […]
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