Becoming American in the Age of Trump
How does one come to feel American in the eyes of others?
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Posts Tagged: george orwell
Reality Is Absurd: Talking with Ted O’Connell
Ted O’Connell discusses his first book, K: A NOVEL.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #193: C.J. Farley
“My novel tries to write the contributions of men and women of color back in.”
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This Thing of Existence: Talking with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his new story collection, THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU.
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There Is Simply No Time for This: Whose Streets? and Civil Rights Cinema
It is unlikely I will see the US justice system evolve toward an egalitarian ideal in my lifetime. But Whose Streets? does offer a clearly visible North Star.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Well, it’s been one week under the Trump administration, and already we are living in a land of “alternative facts.” After Kellyanne Conway used the term to defend Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s falsehoods regarding the inauguration crowd size on Sunday, the American people were, understandably, reminded of George Orwell’s 1984, and sales of the book […]
...moreDown, Out, and “Paved With Anguish”
At the Guardian, Tim Cooke investigates why writers’ experiences with homelessness and destitution fascinates readers: So what is the attraction of being down and out? For some, the prospect of real, hard-hitting subject matter has proved irresistible, while for others the route to the streets has been paved with anguish. Historically, those who have deliberately flung […]
...moreLiterary Cage Match
At The Millions, Jonathan Gottschall compares his experience learning to cage fight with the struggles of being a writer, as “the writing game, like the fighting game, mostly ends in breakage”: Literary history is a history of victors. So stories about the struggles of well-known writers almost always follow the comforting arc of suffering redeemed. But what about […]
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The Rumpus Interview with John Reed
John Reed discusses Snowball’s Chance, his parody of Animal Farm, and the lawsuits, debates, and discoveries that followed the book’s publication.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Kamden Hilliard
Survival is not always cute, politically responsible, mature, or sober. Survival is ramshackle, as is tolerance.
...more1984 or 2016?
For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Stephen Rohde gives a thorough and chilling analyzation of our current socio-political climate which highlights just how closely our world parallels the one that George Orwell predicted in his novel 1984: No one aware of post-9/11 society in the United States, England, Europe, and elsewhere can fail to […]
...moreIn Defense of Precisely Inexact Language
Writing for Aeon, Elijah Millgram uses 1984 and George Orwell’s Newspeak/doublethink idea of language to examine why imperfect language, and expression that is sometimes inexact, contradictory, or misleading, can be better for developing the scope of human reasoning.
...moreIn the Wind Like Singing
Over on Kill Your Darlings, Angela Meyer writes a lovely reflective essay on her time spent in Barnhill, where George Orwell stayed while he wrote 1984. She explores Orwell through the mess that might be 1984, the perfection of his essays, and the importance of a book he renounced, A Clergyman’s Daughter. Much like she […]
...moreOrwell’s First Love
Brain Pickings dives into the young love lives of George Orwell, then known as Eric Blair, and Jacintha Buddicom. Jacintha was famously the model for Julia in Nineteen Eighty-Four, and the interactions between Orwell and Buddicom as they age may be just as heartbreaking, ending with a bittersweet reunion just before Orwell’s death.
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The Rumpus Interview with Andrew Ervin
Andrew Ervin discusses his debut novel, Burning Down George Orwell’s House, social media and writing, and how video games can serve as a way to understand the post-human world.
...moreCamus And Orwell’s Hypothetical Coffee Date
In 1945 George Orwell was scheduled to meet Albert Camus at a café in Paris. However, Camus became ill and the two authors never met. Now, for the Los Angeles Review of Books, Matthew Lamb speculates what might have happened had the two actually had the opportunity to speak. With the help of the authors’ biographies, Lamb […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Robert Repino
Robert Repino talks about his debut novel, Mort(e), the publishing industry, science fiction and literary fiction, writing about religion, and how to write about complex chemical ant languages.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Save this as a bookmark. You writer nerds are going to need it. Assange on Orwell and, of course, the Internet. The seven wonders of the modern technological age. Why the Internet is a portal to our own darkness. Working for academia v. working for the Internet. The freedom of the Internet is becoming less free.
...morePlain Speaker or Liar
According to the Guardian, Dr. Luke Seaber of University College London has uncovered evidence in the London Metropolitan archives that confirms George “Orwell did indeed carry out, more or less as described, one of his ‘down-and-out’ experiments”: he went to jail, for 48 hours, on purpose. Still, Seaber claims that “the veracity” of Orwell’s journalism […]
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The Big Idea: Eula Biss
On Immunity author Eula Biss speaks to Suzanne Koven about mythology, personal freedom, and the history of vaccines.
...moreThe Rules are There
In his new book The Sense of Style, brain scientist Steven Pinker calls for a relaxation of English grammar rules. While the Daily Beast’s review praises Pinker for rejecting the false dichotomy between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, the New Yorker argues that we need rules to communicate. No word yet on using the wrong version […]
...moreThe Orwellian Blunders of Amazon
For Melville House, Alex Shephard examines Amazon’s fraught relationship with George Orwell’s publisher Hachette, criticizing the online shopping hub for misappropriating Orwell’s views on paperback publishing: In context, Orwell not only contradicts Amazon’s argument about paperbacks, he contradicts their entire business model…
...moreCreating New Words
The act of creating new words helps make language more precise. George Orwell once proposed a ministry responsible for inventing new words for precisely that reason, explains The Airship Daily. However, the shortcomings of language and the new words created for precision is the reliance on interpretation: However, coining new words won’t change the fact […]
...moreNotes on Self
At Salon, Laura Miller rebukes Will Self’s criticism of George Orwell at the BBC, arguing that the British novelist has misinterpreted “Politics and the English Language.” She emphasizes the importance that, in his essay, Orwell discussed political writing and did not suggest his “rules” apply to fiction.
...moreLiterature as Ideal Propaganda
During the Cold War, the CIA viewed literature as a potent tool to undermine the Soviet Union. Novels by George Orwell, Albert Camus, Vladimir Nabokov, and James Joyce were smuggled across borders. And, as Nick Romeo explains in the Atlantic, the CIA sought authentic works for its purposes. Doctor Zhivago, hardly a celebration of capitalism, […]
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Back to the Beginning: Why I Write
In the beginning the words flowed like honey, like maple syrup, like corn syrup; yes, the metaphors flowed just like that.
...moreThe Partisan Review, Digitized
The Partisan Review, printed from 1934 to 2004, marked 69 years of cultural history in the US, with notable contributors such as Hannah Arendt, James Baldwin, Samuel Beckett, Allen Ginsberg, Franz Kafka, Doris Lessing, George Orwell, Marge Piercy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Roger Shattuck, Susan Sontag, William Styron, Lionel Trilling, and Robert Penn Warren. Its whole archive […]
...moreClassic Literature or Science Fiction Backstory?
Science fiction creates its whimsical magic by imagining new worlds, or sometimes even new universes, for readers to lose themselves in. But what if the best inspiration we can get for writing about the future comes from our past? A lot of works, especially those of Orwell, aren’t just painting the portrait of a skewed […]
...moreIllustrated Orwell
Commemorating the 50th anniversary of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Ralph Steadman has illustrated the classic satire with distinctive interpretations of the book. Brain Pickings has gathered some of the gleefully odd images.
...moreWriters on Time Spent Down and Out
George Orwell recounted his experiences with poverty in Down and Out in Paris and London, and Paul Auster his in Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure. Rumpus contributor Kaya Genç writes about his own brush with running out of money, and how authors like Orwell and Auster informed his feelings about it, in an essay […]
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