How It Would Feel to Be Free: Olivia Laing’s Everybody
Pleasures and possibilities, though, come hard-won in this book.
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Posts Tagged: freedom
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Maggie Nelson
Maggie Nelson discusses her new book, ON FREEDOM: FOUR SONGS OF CARE AND CONSTRAINT.
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Grab Hold the Rope of Language: A Conversation with Jan Beatty
Jan Beatty discusses her new memoir, AMERICAN BASTARD.
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Upending the Scene: A Conversation with Te-Ping Chen
Te-Ping Chen discusses her debut story collection, LAND OF BIG NUMBERS.
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Agency and Wonder: Amina Cain’s Indelicacy
To read Amina Cain is to enter tide pools of the mind.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Chrissy Stroop and Lauren O’Neal
Co-editors Chrissy Stroop and Lauren O’Neal discuss their new anthology, EMPTY THE PEWS.
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A Sense of God: She Would Be King by Wayétu Moore
Perhaps one of the most beautiful things Moore does is to give voice to those who would not or did not have a voice.
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Effacement of the Mother
When I came home from war, I felt relief. Now that I’m home after childbirth, I’m still waiting for relief. War ends. Motherhood does not.
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Finding Freedom
We never want something more than when it has been taken away from us. The opposite of freedom is confinement.
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The Thread: Ways of Being Seen
Can you see it now? Is the image different in your mind yet? A thing you can’t unsee.
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Loving America: Reading Carlos Bulosan with My Students
Can one love one’s country into a better version of itself? And can that love better the self?
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Libraries Are the Real Punk Rock
Maybe I was only in the eighth grade, but I was ready to stand up to anyone who tried to threaten the ideal of intellectual freedom.
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Looking for Russia in America
Everyone around us is speaking Russian, and I feel like we are in Russia, the old one, before the wall came down. For a moment, I even feel like I belong.
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Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote: Quentin James
What the hell do I have to lose in this country? Honestly, I don’t know where to begin.
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The Rumpus Interview with Shawn Vestal
Shawn Vestal discusses his new novel Daredevils, Evel Knievel, growing up in a mainstream Mormon family, and what he thinks of the American West.
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The Rumpus Interview with Terese Svoboda
Poet Terese Svoboda talks about her biography of the socialist-anarchist firebrand and modernist poet Lola Ridge, Anything That Burns You, and remembers a time when the political was printed in newspapers.
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Conversations with Writers Braver than Me: Anne Roiphe
Anne Roiphe on respecting writers’ freedom to express the truth of their experiences, while also respecting their subjects’ prerogative to shun them for it.
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Michel Tournier and the Novel of Ideas
Do novels think?
...moreHappy Banned Books Week!
The point is not to rank inflammatory books like game highlights. It’s to remind readers that information hasn’t always been free, and that we have librarians to thank for its freedom. Huffington Post’s Maddie Crum explores why we celebrate Banned Books Week in America, and takes a look at freedom of information and the librarians […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Sword and Her Sister
Frozen is a study in what happens when imagination is constrained to a single narrative arc
...moreLiberty, Justice
From Freedom to Purity, there’s no denying the man likes his themes. Over at Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon reviews Jonathan Franzen’s forthcoming novel: Does Franzen truly believe his readers need to hear that the world is impure? For another take on Purity, check out Alden Jones’s Rumpus review of the novel here.
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Purity by Jonathan Franzen
Alden Jones reviews Purity by Jonathan Franzen today in Rumpus Books.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jay Rubin
Author and translator Jay Rubin talks about his new novel, The Sun Gods, translating Haruki Murakami into English, and the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.
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The Saturday Rumpus Review of Ex Machina
Ex Machina is pretty adept at tricking viewers into thinking we’re smarter than the film.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jacob Wren
Jacob Wren discusses his newest novel, Polyamorous Love Song, the relationship between art and ethics, and whether Kanye West is a force for good in the art and music world.
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Farther Away, by Jonathan Franzen
Bibliophysicists now speculate that no less than three parallel versions of Jonathan Franzen can coexist at any given moment, and the variant, some say, could be much higher. This assortment of Franzens—and how readers interpret them—can make an impartial reading of his work problematic. The fifty-three-year-old novelist exists, first, as one of America’s most celebrated […]
...moreRun Yvonne, Run
Yvonne is the craftiest farm animal to evade slaughter since Wilbur. After this six-year old German cow ran away en route to the slaughterhouse back in May, she’s been on the loose, making headlines, garnering sympathy from the public and once running into a police car before making yet another seamless getaway. She is so […]
...morePercival Everett on Franzen, Sexism and The Great American Novel
“I do not believe that apparent authoritative literary voices of validation would ever make such a grand claim about a novel written by a woman. I say this because I believe there are many novels by women that are about the same sort of world as presented in Freedom. Sadly, the culture usually calls these […]
...morePodcast Q&A With Paris Review Editor Lorin Stein
Over at Hot Metal Bridge, Steve Gillies hits us with a podcast version of a Q&A with Lorin Stein. Introduced by author Chuck Kinder, Lorin Stein talks with the book review editor of The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and chats about Freedom and the future of the publishing industry.
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