Starting with Fire: A Conversation with Mai Der Vang
Mai Der Vang discusses her new poetry collection, YELLOW RAIN.
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Posts Tagged: Cold War
Quiet, Radical Defiance: The Equivalents by Maggie Doherty
Education, work, study: these were not simply a means to an end.
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Flesh and Blood: A Conversation with Oksana Zabuzhko
Oksana Zabuzhko discusses her story collection, YOUR AD COULD GO HERE.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “Journalists Invade Former Soviet Union”
The missionaries seemed concerned. I figured it was too late for that.
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Through the Translator’s Lens: Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough’s Objects of Affection
For Hryniewicz-Yarbrough, language provides a stronger connection with the past than nationality alone.
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Fidel Castro: The Playboy Comandante
The comandante produced ideological fantasies on a mass scale within the context of the Cold War which led to an exotic, sexy, and happy vision of Cuba.
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Radiant with Terror: Lowell and the Uncertain Country of Love
I found comfort in the way that Lowell’s poems frequently explore the landscape of mental illness and blur the lines between the self and the world.
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My End of the World at Rajneeshpuram
I used to play a game with myself: who should die first, me or daddy? When I was very little, I could never come up with a good answer.
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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?
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The Rumpus Interview with Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Lucy Jane Bledsoe discusses her latest book, A Thin Bright Line, uncovering the remarkable story of her aunt, and illuminating history through the lens of imagination.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Tinfoil Astronaut
Every time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark the outline of my body with blinking stars and black thread.
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Compartment No. 6 by Rosa Liksom
John Flynn-York reviews Rosa Liksom’s Compartment No. 6, now out from Graywolf in an English translation, today in Rumpus Books.
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FUNNY WOMEN #141: How to Write about Eastern Europe
Use words like “nostalgia,” “paranoia,” and “amnesia” liberally.
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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.
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Doomsday Clock Keeps Ticking
The metaphorical doomsday clock moved two minutes closer to midnight last week by scientists concerned about climate change. The 68-year-old concept was developed to gauge how close the world is to destruction, with the end coming at midnight. When the clock debuted, the time was set at 7 minutes to midnight in the wake of the […]
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Tom Sleigh
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Tom Sleigh about his new book, Station Zed,, how reportage and the surreal can combine inside a poem, and secularizing the mysteries of death, redemption, and resurrection.
...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, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Elliott Holt
Writer and Rumpus contributor Elliott Holt sits down to discuss her debut novel, You Are One of Them, her preoccupation with secrets, and working in 1990s Moscow during Russia’s economic transition.
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