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?
...more
Posts Tagged: christopher hitchens
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…
...moreAziz 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 Turkish humorist Aziz Nesin at The Millions. Nesin, who Genç compares to Christopher Hitchens and […]
...moreA 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 memorializing of public figures like Kurt Cobain and Christopher Hitchens actually do in their tellings, […]
...more
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.
...moreFree Rant
Pete 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 […]
...moreHumor: 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 do not feel bad if you were unfavorably named). While editors Kathleen Volk Miller and Marion […]
...moreIn 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 inspiration than a source of potential epigraphs for his own work. Clark analyzes several epigraphs […]
...moreSorry, 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 the real world, rather than Misogynist Fantasyland, where women have never, ever rejected Christopher Hitchens […]
...more
“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 forgotten paperbacks at some random flea market. Perhaps the beauty stems from the feeling of […]
...moreHitchens 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 detail.’” Despite recently undergoing chemotherapy for esophageal cancer, Hitchens still shows up to debate a […]
...moreRemembering Tony Judt
Tony 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.
...moreThe Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement
Porn, Christopher Hitchens, snacking on weaker humans … You name it, Rumpus Books has got it. Our weekly roundup below the fold.
...moreWhy Christopher Hitchens Doesn’t Matter
Hitchens’ new memoir Hitch-22 is a sprawling self-portrait of a name-dropper and a hanger-on.
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
The 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 […]
...moreThe Decline Of Hitchens, Again
A 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 […]
...moreLink to Drink: What Christopher Hitchens Gave Up God For
Rarely 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 […]
...more