English
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The Fraught Nature of Belonging: Nathalie Handal’s Life in a Country Album
Each poem opens a window into cities and vocabularies of exile.
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We Are Natural Creatures: Talking with Karen Solie
“At the limit of language we meet our mortality.”
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Concealed Histories: Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Heart
America is Not the Heart offers Filipinx-Americans the gratification of being seen, and a way of seeing.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Achy Obejas
Achy Obejas discusses her new collection, The Tower of the Antilles, what she’s learned from translating works of others, and why we should all read poetry every day.
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Reading across Cultures: A Conversation with Ratika Kapur
Ratika Kapur discusses her latest book, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, the disappointing romance of affairs, and how people carry on after doing the unthinkable.
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A Meer-Kin in Paris
Her face lit up, and I checked to make sure the man’s scowl had returned. It wasn’t enough for me that heaven should exist for the wife; her husband had to end up in hell.
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Translating the War in Syria
At Lit Hub, Lina Mounzer discusses the Syrian women bearing witness to the war through writing, her own complicated relationship with the English language, and translation as a symbolic act: [War] reshapes your vocabulary. It becomes part of your language.…
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Shakespeare Didn’t Make up as Many Words as We Think
For the Guardian, Alison Flood writes on the bias of the Oxford English Dictionary towards “famous literary examples” instead of the actual origin, resulting in the incorrect attribution of several still-used words and phrases to Shakespeare. Flood writes that there are multitudes…
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Disliked Words around the World
Sworn haters of the word ‘moist,’ now is your chance to be heard. Oxford Dictionaries has launched a worldwide vote to find English language speakers’ least favorite word, the Guardian’s Alison Flood reported. Other top contenders include “no,” “like,” and…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: There Are No Good Muslims
I say I am Catholic because it is easier than telling the truth.
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Countries, Languages, and Writing
But what about those writers who move to another country and do not change language, who continue to write in their mother tongue many years after it has ceased to be the language of daily conversation? Do the words they…
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Language as Both Salve and Poison
What I have seen, what we have seen, is language forced into the service of violence. A rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible, then vomited out in images and words that we cannot ignore though we have…