The Fine Line Between Nihilism and Hope: Talking with Ahmed Naji
Ahmed Naji discusses his new memoir, ROTTEN EVIDENCE.
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Posts Tagged: Dostoevsky
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Visual Poems by David Joez Villaverde
Can this really still be my dream?
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An East African Girl and Her White Troubadours
I was a lonely, dreamy, occasionally silly girl.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Mariana Dimópulos and Alice Whitmore
Author Mariana Dimópulos and translator Alice Whitmore discuss ALL MY GOODBYES.
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Language Is All Convention: Talking with Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman discusses her new novel The Idiot, what it means to be a writer, and the artifice of language.
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We Have Met the Maelstrom, and It Is Us: Dean Rader’s Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry
Umbrellas are flimsy shelters from the maelstrom, and Rader keeps going because he can’t stop.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #72: Laurie Sheck
Laurie Sheck is the author, most recently, of Island of the Mad, and A Monster’s Notes, a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for The Willow Grove, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the […]
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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.
...moreA Brief Relationship with Writing
At The Millions, Bryan VanDyke reflects on his experience writing several unpublished novels, and how these manuscripts helped motivate him to write the draft of his first published work in less than a week: My grad school mentor, the brooding and kind-hearted author David Plante, would sometimes refer to unsuccessful books as “one more for the […]
...moreThe Reality of Absolution
Over on the National Book Critic Circle’s blog, Sam Sacks relays his experience reading Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, both as a teenager and an adult desperate to believe in a distance between his present self and that teenager. Both a fantastic little exploration of a classic and a sincere dive into the personal, Sacks’s thoughts […]
...moreThe Saturday Rumpus Essay: Never Really Alone
Blood and smoke and broken windows aren’t the only images out of Baltimore (though they sure do get good ratings).
...moreSound and the Fury 2.0
Is Lila inspired by The Idiot and The Sounds and The Fury? I’m not sure whether Lila is a stand-in for Christ, but it is clear to me that Robinson has written a character, a new kind of idiot, who is as impressive as Prince Myshkin from The Idiot or Benjy from The Sound and […]
...moreCrime and Punishment: the Musical!
Coming soon to the Moscow stage: Dostoevsky’s masterwork of darkness, desperation, and brutal murder in the style of musical theatre, reports the Guardian.
...moreReading Makes You Better At Life
A degree in English may make your job search harder, but it makes empathy and social interaction easier, according to a study conducted by some people who had more practical majors. The study, published in Science, found that literary fiction like Dostoevsky or Louise Erdrich enhanced subjects’ ability to read others’ emotions more than did popular […]
...moreIvan and Misha
Michael Alenyikov’s award-winning new book, Ivan and Misha, explores many-faceted love—from the intense and fleeting to bonds of familial obligation.
...moreFrom Russia with Love
Elif Batuman offers a rogue’s gallery of Russian writers, scholars, and literary characters—the only oddball missing is herself.
...moreCrown of Sonnets
An anthology of stories from the new Russia shows the continuity between contemporary writers and their canonical predecessors
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