Terror Is a Faggot with Halal Sausages Strapped to His Chest
Dishonesty became a form of protection.
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...more“Wherever you are on earth, you are safe,” writes Richard Hugo. Really?
...more[A] nation’s poetry degenerates if it does not embody the language of what is mysterious…
...moreThis 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 Turkish humorist Aziz Nesin at The Millions. Nesin, who Genç compares to Christopher Hitchens and […]
...moreTwentieth 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 memorializing of public figures like Kurt Cobain and Christopher Hitchens actually do in their tellings, […]
...moreJohn Reed discusses Snowball’s Chance, his parody of Animal Farm, and the lawsuits, debates, and discoveries that followed the book’s publication.
...morePete Ross takes huge issue with the infiltration of content marketers and voracious “personal brand” builders at Medium and elsewhere. His point is clear: writing is more than posturing to sell yourself as a writer: All you’re trying to do is get a dopamine response from people, in turn getting a dopamine response yourself through […]
...moreNot 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 do not feel bad if you were unfavorably named). While editors Kathleen Volk Miller and Marion […]
...moreAt 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 inspiration than a source of potential epigraphs for his own work. Clark analyzes several epigraphs […]
...morePlenty 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 the real world, rather than Misogynist Fantasyland, where women have never, ever rejected Christopher Hitchens […]
...moreAn 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 forgotten paperbacks at some random flea market. Perhaps the beauty stems from the feeling of […]
...more“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 detail.’” Despite recently undergoing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, Hitchens still shows up to debate a […]
...moreTony Judt, the British historian and social critic, died last Friday at 62 from complications of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Although it left him nearly paralyzed, his brain was unimpaired, as evidenced by the series of personal essays he wrote for the New York Review Of Books this year.
...morePorn, Christopher Hitchens, snacking on weaker humans … You name it, Rumpus Books has got it. Our weekly roundup below the fold.
...moreHitchens’ new memoir Hitch-22 is a sprawling self-portrait of a name-dropper and a hanger-on.
...moreThe author of the forthcoming My Life with the Lincolns asks what happens when you type Abraham Lincoln into Etsy. The answer is pretty awesome. Anyone interested in fiction and the Internet should read this now. Sappho and banjos! (via Bookslut) “Why does everyone hate the small bookstore?” (via Bookninja) In the age old rivalry between Batman […]
...moreA long time ago, back when I was basking in over-priced Leftism in Santa Cruz, I gave a gift to my friend: Letters To A Yong Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens. At that time Hitchens was a venom-tongued writer for the progressive magazine The Nation and was still pals with the other equally acid-tongued provocateur, Alexander […]
...moreRarely have I seen a Christopher Hitchens TV interview in which the atheistic author of God is Not Great isn’t knocking back an ice-clinking glass of whiskey of some brand or another. Yet, I never knew Hitch’s hootch of choice was Johnny Walker Black Label until I read a first-person account posted on the brainstorms blog of an evening spent […]
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