Our Recognizable, Difficult, Earthly Kingdom: Such Color by Tracy K. Smith
Composition here becomes a process of discernment rather than pure creation.
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Posts Tagged: Civil War
Searching for Who We Want to Be: A Conversation with Trisha R. Thomas
Trisha R. Thomas discusses her new novel, WHAT PASSES AS LOVE.
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Identity as a Hall of Mirrors: Descent by Lauren Russell
This book is a marriage of the real world and the imagination, the nexus of nonfiction and fiction.
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On Anger, Autism, and Blackness
The rage and frustration overwhelmed all rational thought.
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Welcome to South Bend: The South Bend Fugitive Slave Case
You have shown no proof of your claim. This family may go free.
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Trudging Down Death Road
Reveal yourself. Reveal yourself. You cannot be dead. Reveal yourself.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey discusses her new collection, MONUMENT: POEMS NEW AND SELECTED.
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Nothing Foreign about It: Talking with Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad discusses his debut novel American War, suicide terrorism, fossil fuels, and blankets.
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The Lens Magnifies, the Mirror Reflects: What Photos from the Race War Show Us about Ourselves
[Still photos] grab what otherwise might feel too foreign to understand.
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The Possible Absence of a Future: Talking with Jorie Graham
Jorie Graham discusses her latest collection, Fast, the terrifying destruction of our planet, a happy formal accident, and how to live in times of world crisis.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 15): “Southern History”
We can’t hide from our history and we can’t pass it on to future generations.
...moreAlbum of the Week: To Syria, With Love by Omar Souleyman
Before becoming one of the most praised electronic music producers of the last few years, Omar Souleyman was a successful wedding singer in his homeland Syria, with something like five hundred live albums released through 2011, the year the civil war broke in his country, forcing him to flee to Turkey, where he’s been based ever since. […]
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Swinging Modern Sounds #81: On Cultural Preservation
The Lost Boys had their moment in the media, but these people, these survivors, not boys at all and not lost now either, are still here, living lives, growing and changing and thinking and reflecting.
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On Speaking Plainly: A Conversation with Rajith Savanadasa
Rajith Savanadasa discusses his debut novel, Ruins, writing across oceans, and the chance encounter with refugees that led to the story at the heart of his novel.
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All Writing Is Political: A Conversation with Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid discusses his new novel, Exit West, hope in fiction as a form of resistance, the necessity of learning to accept social change, and how much America and Pakistan have come to resemble each other.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #78: Conceived as a Playlist
Shadowbahn […] is among the most unusual, and most extreme, in a literary career that has often been marked by its unpredictability.
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TORCH: Growing Season
I ask Hussein if he’s proud of the work he’s doing. He says that he is. We stop talking. For a moment, the market feels like peace.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #67: Anuradha Roy
A tranquil beach town named Jarmuli is the setting of Anuradha Roy’s third novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and made the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker Prize. Four older women travel as friends in search of a bucolic vacation, and a young woman, contending with the […]
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A Crown for Gumecindo by Laurie Ann Guerrero
Diego Báez reviews Laurie Ann Guerrero’s A Crown for Gumecindo today in Rumpus Poetry.
...moreThe Night Wash Jones Won
Eighty years ago, Wash Jones appeared as a minor character in William Faulkner’s masterpiece on American identity and self-invention, Absalom, Absalom! From a craft perspective Jones was put in for a purpose: to demonstrate the role that white working-class men played in maintaining white supremacy among the wealthiest people in America before the Civil War, […]
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The Rumpus Review of Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation
Parker set out to bring a different kind of “slavery movie” to audiences. And it is different.
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Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote: Quentin James
What the hell do I have to lose in this country? Honestly, I don’t know where to begin.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Pain Scale Treaties
Perched on the shoulders of generational trauma sit these two theses: suffering begets cruelty begets suffering begets cruelty, and pain is empathy’s catalyst.
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The Rumpus Interview with Ben H. Winters
Ben H. Winters discusses his new novel Underground Airlines about an America where the Civil War never took place, writing speculative fiction, and modern racism.
...moreSci-Fi and Slavery
“The first impulse is to go, oh man, are you supposed to be writing about that, as a white American?” he said. “We tend to think of racism and slavery as something that’s appropriate only for black artists to engage with, and there’s something troubling and perverse about that.” In a new novel, white author […]
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Laura Ballance’s Ghost Stories
There is one story that my mother used to tell me often, which has become in some ways a symbol of my childhood.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Widow
If he had died in the Civil War, the extent of my mourning would have been a scandal. He was not my husband, my fiancé, my father, or my brother.
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The Rumpus Interview with Chris Jennings
Chris Jennings talks about his new book Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, incremental reform, Transcendentalists, Shakers, and creating a more perfect future.
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The Rumpus Interview with Margo Jefferson
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Margo Jefferson talks about her new memoir, Negroland, and about growing up in an elite black community in the segregated Chicago of the 1950s and 1960s.
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Albums of Our Lives: Matt Jones’s The Deep Enders
Matt Jones writes haunting songs. February songs. Songs that get under my skin and seep into my short stories. Songs that remind me of the rust belt and the south…
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