The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Dr. Amra Sabic-El-Rayess
“The difference with memorializing my story is that I have invited others to live it, for a moment.”
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Posts Tagged: Columbia University
Heartbreak and Hair Dye: Talking with Amy Feltman
Amy Feltman discusses her debut novel, WILLA & HESPER.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #94: David Burr Gerrard
David Burr Gerrard’s new novel The Epiphany Machine is one of the more ambitious books you’ll read this year, centering on a device that can reveal the epiphany of your life by tattooing the words onto your arm. “ABANDONS WHAT MATTERS MOST” is just one example of the sort of permanent self-owns that get written […]
...moreTalk Literary to Me
The artist statement is not just a representation of what you are working on, but an intervention in what you are working on. If you start saying, I aim to do this and not to do this, maybe it keeps you from thinking of your perfect aim, which is none of those things. For BOMB, […]
...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 […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Raphael Cormack
Raphael Cormack discusses The Book of Khartoum: A City in Short Fiction, a collection of short stories he co-edited and translated, the editorial process, and the responsibilities that accompany translating writing.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat With Camille Rankine
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Camille Rankine about her new book Incorrect Merciful Impulses, history, and trying to be a writer every day.
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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.
...moreThe End of Literature
The rapid rise of “trigger warnings” is starting to impact literature curriculums. For instance, Columbia University students lobbied to include warnings on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a core text in Western Literature syllabi. Columbia refused to include warnings, but essentially capitulated by expunging the text from its curriculum entirely. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita were […]
...moreLearning to Work with Rare Books
In 1983, Terry Belanger created a curriculum for librarians to learn how to deal with rare books at Columbia University. Nine years later, the University of Virginia hired him and the Rare Book School moved to Charlottesville. The school now has 80,000 rare volumes and runs highly competitive five-day session where students are taught the ins and […]
...moreEmma Sulkowicz: A Rumpus Roundup
Emma Sulkowicz graduated from Columbia University yesterday. She might have gone unnoticed had she not also been carrying around a mattress. In her sophomore year at Columbia, Sulkowicz was raped. Like many rape victims, Sulkowicz considered her attacker a friend, and he was someone she had slept with twice before. On the night of the […]
...moreRolling Stone: A Rumpus Roundup
Last month, Rolling Stone ran an article by Sabrina Rubin Erdely detailing the gang-rape and attempted coverup of a student at the University of Virginia known as “Jackie.” . Today, Rolling Stone issued an apology. Editors at the magazine did not contact the men Jackie accused of rape. Part of the problem was the fear […]
...moreNights to Remember
I offer all of this not by way of aimless self-revelation, but as a way of provoking you to remember your stories about similar incidents in your life, stories about the night, and who smoked what and who was doing who mixed in with outside events, such as the politics of your time, mixed in with […]
...moreLiterary Salon: Genuine Storytelling
The new media landscape might tear writing as we know it apart—or it might give us opportunities to find thrilling new niches. Tomorrow night in NYC, join writers and editors from Columbia University, Tin House, and more to hear how they’ve “carved out a new media approach to old school storytelling,” and how you, too, […]
...moreNaked Breakfast
Good Morning. Hungry? Why not listen to William S. Burroughs reading from Naked Lunch? Or how about viewing some of the Naked Lunch manuscript? Or pictures of different editions of the book since its publication in 1959? Or hell, how about some great pictures of the man himself? Well all that and more can be […]
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