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Fortinbras felt so good / the way he came after everyone was dead / with an army, and their complexes were dead / dead, dead, but still soft, the flush / just barely drained from of their cheeks,
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Alix Ohlin discusses her new story collection, WE WANT WHAT WE WANT.
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Carrie La Seur discusses her new novel, The Weight of an Infinite Sky, standing up for what you know is right, and the writers who inspire her.
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Whether you are celebrating your father or cursing his name this Father’s Day, here’s a list of very good books about fathers from writers we love.
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File this one under “they can’t Trump everything; life goes on.” Last week, I got caught up in reflections on poverty in America: mine, yours, and ours. This week, I decided to do something about it and buckle down to design a careful budget. “Ack!,” I said, early one morning. “We’ve got to make a budget […]
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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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Politics has become a bloated balloon on the horizon of our days, marked with the face of the Pr*sident, grinning under his orange corona like a demented sun-god, a raucous Ra. It burns.
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Maybe it has something to do with the watery world that a fetus inhabits—our words taking on the summersaulting quality of an internal water ballet.
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At the Kenyon Review blog, Amit Majmudar explores how a bad story in the hands of someone like Shakespeare can turn into literary genius.
...moreHow many times do you need to reread Hamlet? Stephen Marche says he’s reread the play more than a hundred times. And all that reading has not been without effect. Marche says that by rereading Hamlet, its meaning has changed: The main effect of reading Hamlet a 100 times was, counter-intuitively, that it lost its sense of […]
...moreShakespeare is invading China. The first complete Chinese translation of the works of Shakespeare wasn’t released until 1967, but Britain’s number one dramatist is now starting to catch the attention of Chinese audiences, reports Melville House’s Moby Lives, saying Shakespeare is “having a cultural moment.”
...more(n.); belief in ghosts; etymology difficult to trace, but typically attributed to the Greek eidolon (“image, apparition, phantom, ghost”) There was something else in the house, unmentioned and unlabelled. A sort of shadowy presence that hovered by the back door. No one referred to it, so I kept quiet, but without ever really actually seeing […]
...moreThis week, Rumpus books reviewed Terry Castle’s book of essays, interviewed Elaine Showalter, wrote about Nabokov, and talked about grief and Hamlet. Come see what you missed.
...more“My grief has been all the usual and varied colours of sadness and madness. It has been searing, voluptuous, numbing. I foresaw that it would be — I have been unhappy, unsettled, unbalanced before (who has not?). I did not foresee that, this time, for much of the time that I was most antic and […]
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