christopher hitchens
-
Terror Is a Faggot with Halal Sausages Strapped to His Chest
Dishonesty became a form of protection.
-
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 13): “Letter to Simic from Boulder”
“Wherever you are on earth, you are safe,” writes Richard Hugo. Really?
-
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 9): “The City Limits”
[A] nation’s poetry degenerates if it does not embody the language of what is mysterious…
-
Aziz Nesin’s Ghost
This week, the Turkish government has jailed a prominent politician who is referred to fondly as “Kurdish Obama” and shutdown Cumhuriyet, a popular newspaper. Amid these distressing developments, Kaya Genç looks towards books and history in her profile of 20th century…
-
A Eulogy for the Eulogy
Twentieth century philosopher J.L. Austin asked in his writing what words and phrases could do in their utterance. In this tradition, Nick Ripatrazone examines Morgan Meis and Stefanie Anne Goldberg’s fictionalized eulogy collection, Dead People, to find out what the…
-
The Rumpus Interview with John Reed
John Reed discusses Snowball’s Chance, his parody of Animal Farm, and the lawsuits, debates, and discoveries that followed the book’s publication.
-
Humor: A Reader for Writers
Not one but two “Funny Women” pieces are included in Oxford University Press’s Humor: A Reader for Writers: Erin Somers’s “Funny Women #99: Modern Vice” and Katie Burgess’s “Funny Women #102: How to Read a Poem” (only women whose last names end with “s” were considered, so…
-
In Search of Lost Epigraphs
At The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark ruminates on the idea of the epigraph. Over the past decade, Clark has kept a Word document filled with quotes from literature, and the amassed 30,000 words, he admits, are less for insight and…
-
Sorry, Fellas, You’re Not That Funny
Plenty of people, from Christopher Hitchens to Adam Carolla, have made the assertion that women aren’t funny. You can probably guess that we at the Rumpus disagree, since we have a whole feature devoted to Funny Women (plus we live in…
-
“Mortality,” by Christopher Hitchens
An amorphous aura resonates around authors we discover on our own. Before we hear of their fame and talent, before everyone recommends their book as a “must read” we find their book, lost, broken, beat up in a pile of…
-
Hitchens On Dying
“At a luncheon earlier in the day with Hitchens and Berlinski, Taunton asked Hitchens about his health problems. ‘Well, I’m dying, since you asked,’ Hitchens replied. ‘So are you, but I’m doing it faster and in more rich and fecund…