Sharp and Twisty and Complicated: Talking with Melanie Abrams
Melanie Abrams discusses her debut novel, PLAYING, and a forthcoming novel, MEADOWLARK.
...more
Posts Tagged: Freud
Blue, Blue Windows: On Writing and Helplessness in the Age of Trump
The brain in the jar wants out, you know. It just can’t do anything about it.
...more
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?
...more
Donald Thinks
Donald believes the earth is round, he does, and that it spins on its axis and revolves around the sun. No doubt. He just prefers the old rectangular tales with their sharp borders and precipitous ends.
...more
The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #33: Solstice Soul Song
Today I write on the longest day of the year, the summer solstice. As someone who has been influenced by not a few pagan practitioners and Wiccan wonder workers, along with more conventional priests and monks of various religious varieties, I am attuned to the turning of our planet in the cosmos. Striving to be […]
...more
The Rumpus Review of It Comes at Night
“It” does not even “come” in the traditional sense. These primal, atavistic qualities are with us all the time, lying dormant until the right situation coaxes them forth.
...moreUnforbidden but Still Hidden
Psychoanalyst and writer Adam Phillips talks with his editor, Ileene Smith, about unforbidden pleasures and his new book of the same title at FSG’s Works in Progress. Phillips respectfully declines Freud’s narrow of view of the origins of desire, pleasure, and inhibition, and hopes for new illumination. He ends by saying, “So I think that […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Campbell McGrath
Campbell McGrath talks about his new collection, XX: Poems For The Twentieth Century, capitalism, history, and what it might mean to write a wordless poem.
...more
Anomalisa, the Insanity of Capitalism, and the Power of Culture
Our insane system: does it feel too risky to bring this up in the mainstream press?
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jen Pastiloff
I am good at making people feel safe.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Bill Clegg
Author and agent Bill Clegg talks about his new novel, Did You Ever Have A Family, grief in fiction and in life, and why there is no finish line except the final finish line.
...moreIf We Don’t Tell Our Stories, We Become Sick
I’ve always been writing about the same thing: that truth and stories are inextricably linked, that stories are truer than fact because they are fact organized into meaning. If we don’t tell our stories, if we don’t remember, and if we don’t leave stories, then our world becomes sick and we become sick. Only the […]
...moreHappiness is Overrated
Critical theorist Mari Ruti writes about how humans may not be built for happiness: “If all of that isn’t enough to make you suspicious of the cultural injunction to be happy, consider this basic psychoanalytic insight: Human beings may not be designed for happy, balanced lives. The irony of happiness is that it’s precisely when […]
...moreCold-Blooded and Bothered
Ellen Ullman’s throbbing new novel, By Blood, tells the story of an eavesdropping neighbor with a compulsive attention to sound.
...moreSteve Almond’s Bad Poetry Corner #13: In Hiroshima
(Writing wretched verse so you don’t have to since 1995) In Hiroshima In Hiroshima, after the bomb the sick lay close as lovers, the strong put tags on those who stood no chance later to be flayed by fire
...moreBeyond the Pleasure Principle
A review of Vienna Triangle, by Brenda Webster Vienna Triangle is much more than the construction of a fiction around historical facts and figures.
...more