Notable Online: 5/9–5/15
Literary events taking place virtually this week!
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Posts Tagged: colm toibin
This Off-Kilter Triangle: A Conversation with Leah Hampton
Leah Hampton discusses her debut collection, F*CKFACE AND OTHER STORIES.
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Notable NYC: 1/25–1/31
Literary events in and around NYC this week!
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Notable NYC: 3/2–3/8
Literary events in and around NYC this week!
...moreNotable NYC: 4/21–4/27
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
...moreNotable NYC: 3/24–3/30
Literary events and readings in and around New York City this week!
...moreNotable NYC: 6/3–6/9
Saturday 6/3: March for Truth. Foley Square, 9 a.m., priceless. Val Emmich presents The Reminders. Maxwells Tavern, 7 p.m., $7. Oliver Baez Bendorf, Cortney Lamar Charleston, Joseph Fasano, Megan Fernandes, Michael Homolka, Nomi Stone, and Leah Umansky celebrate Thrush Poetry Journal. KGB Bar, 7 p.m., free.
...moreWalk-In Closets
We seem to find ourselves, as writers, standing amidst the last century’s discarded tropes of sexual identity. Recently, writers of all sexual permutations have been recycling this narrative architecture; reworking its stones and walls and windows; borrowing and transforming the old, four-square structures of identity into Gehry-like fantasias, curves, and spires. In the Boston Review, Stacey […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Saleem Haddad
Saleem Haddad discusses his debut novel Guapa, the Orlando shootings, the importance of queer spaces, and Arab literature.
...morePrimal Urges
Alexander Matthews interviews Colm Toíbín for Aerodrome, touching on Toíbín’s transition from journalism and poetry to fiction, coming out, therapy, expatriatism, and the fallacy of self-expression. Toíbín describes the writing process—and writing life—as a “basic urge to communicate levels of feeling—things from the nervous system, and from memory, to other people. In the same way […]
...moreA Place That She Herself Has Imagined
Brooklyn is a place of layers both personal and historical, one that, as Colm Tóibín puts it, is “full of ghosts.” Reflecting on the recent film adaptation of his novel, the Brooklyn author observes one of the borough’s more visible specters: You could invent yourself here, even if the term self-invention was not yet understood […]
...moreStrangely in the Middle
If rats then represent terror and chickens innocent striving for something approaching authenticity, humans, for Lispector, are strangely in the middle, often stricken with fear, or handing out terror, but ready also to soar or break loose or achieve some freedom or be fully alert to their fate in a time short enough for one […]
...moreBuddies, Bishop and Gunn
Colm Toíbín, author of On Elizabeth Bishop, has a lovely long reflection at the Guardian about Bishop’s friendship with Thom Gunn, and the parallels in the artists’ life and work. Bishop and Gunn both shied away from writing about mentally ill mothers and queer relationships for most of their lives, although Gunn addressed both in the 1990s. […]
...moreA New Read on Bishop
For a poet as anthologized as Elizabeth Bishop, it’s fair to say there’s a certain lack of serious criticism—or perhaps, critics thinking seriously—about her work, compared to the Modernists against whose influence she was writing. Eavan Boland reviews a new volume by Colm Tóibín that aims to begin closing the gulf. On Elizabeth Bishop is […]
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
It’s a week of New York stories. First, in honor of St. Pat and maybe too those of us still a little rocked by the Daylight Savings shift, note should be made of “Sleep” by Colm Tóibín, which appeared in the New Yorker this week. It’s a quieter—okay, sleepier—type of a story, but also potent, sharp, […]
...moreNotable NYC: 1/24–1/30
Saturday 1/24: Barbara Elovic reads Other People’s Stories, poems. BookCourt, 7 p.m., free. Sophie Seita and Ron Silliman join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Maxwell Donnewald, Jacob Kaplan, Bill Kemmler, Sam Regal, and Stephen Lloyd launch Sporadicus. Mellow Pages, 7:30 p.m., free. Sunday 1/25: Shelly Oria and Lee Matthew Goldberg join the […]
...moreNotable NYC: 10/18–10/24
Saturday 10/18: Poetry Forum 2014. The New School, 10 a.m., $45 daily / $135 full pass. Melissa Buckheit reads poetry along with Corollary Press founder Sueyeun Juliette Lee. Berl’s Poetry Shop. Happy fifth anniversary Greenlight Bookstore. Celebrate all day, party at night. Greenlight Bookstore, 7:30 p.m., free. Peyton Marshall talks with Julia Fierro about Marshall’s […]
...moreWhat Would Lynne Tillman Do?
It is nearly impossible to live in New York City without feeling a flicker of Lynne Tillman’s exacting presence. Over at the New Yorker, the indomitable Colm Toibin writes about the (equally) indomitable Lynne Tillman in the introduction to What Would Lynne Tillman Do?: Essays. Lynne Tillman’s essays, and indeed the interviews she has given and […]
...moreNotable NYC: 2/1–2/7
Saturday 2/1: Chris Hosea writes customized poetry for visitors of Ugly Duckling Presse’s gallery event. Third Factory at Old American Can Factory, noon, free. Chris Nealon and Catherine Wagner read poetry as part of the Segue Reading Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Sunday 2/2: Robert Seidman celebrates James Joyce’s 132nd birthday. Seidman is co-author […]
...moreWriters and Families
“This idea of the older generation as strange, insistent shadows moving closer and closer to substance as time went on, the idea that I was writing, pushing myself to work, almost because they could not or did not, that I was inspired by their silence, has echoes in the work of other writers.” At The […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Yiyun Li
I first interviewed Yiyun Li in 2005 when she won the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, among many other awards, for her debut collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers. Her first novel, The Vagrants, is forthcoming in February 2009. *** The Rumpus: As a writer, how do you feel when you’re asked to make […]
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