Iran
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Solmaz Sharif
Solmaz Sharif discusses her new collection Look, the difference between nearness and similarity, and the level of ownership we have over stories.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jensen Beach
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Jensen Beach about his short story collection Swallowed by the Cold, suburbia in Sweden, quiet racism, and writing a series of connected short stories.
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American Ambiguity
My racial awareness, perhaps even my awareness of myself as a person, self-consciousness, is a three-pronged paradox of shame, pride, and indifference.
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The Rumpus Interview with Meline Toumani
Meline Toumani discusses her debut, There Was and There Was Not, the rewards and risks of writing a political memoir, and what it means to approach a divided past and future.
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This Week in Indie Bookstores
A Paris bookseller writes about the terror attacks. Parisians, meanwhile, are responding to the terror attacks by buying up all the copies of Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Iranian bookstores opened early on Thursday last week in a campaign to…
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Iran Calls Rushdie Speech at Frankfurt “Anti-Cultural”
This has been organised by the Frankfurt book fair and crosses one of our political system’s red lines. We consider this move as anti-cultural,” [Seyed Abbas Salehi, deputy minister for culture and Islamic guidance] said, according to local news agencies.…
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Dan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) While we’re getting rid of the flag, here’s some other Confederate memorabilia we should get rid of. Russia is trying to promote…
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Fresh Comics #1: An Iranian Metamorphosis
The question that lingers even after reading the book is about the use of symbolism in the cartoon and who has the final say—the creator or the readers?
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Word of the Day: Esemplasy
(n.); unification; to make into one; the unifying power of imagination; accredited to Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) “Austen is far from superficial … Her books are intimate and compelling. She has a voice that somehow seems to chime even with…
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The Rumpus Interview with Gina Nahai
Gina Nahai talks about her fifth novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., Iran and Los Angeles, and the possibility of a long-sought-after peace in the Middle East.
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ISIS: A Rumpus Roundup
The Islamic State of Iraq in Syria, known better as ISIS, has operated in Syria and Iraq since 2003 as an offshoot of al-Qaeda—at least until al-Qaeda disavowed any connection. The military organization is neither a political party nor religious…
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The Rumpus Interview with Porochista Khakpour
Writer Porochista Khakpour discusses her new novel, The Last Illusion, her desire to literalize the surreal, the role addiction plays for her characters and narrative, and being a lover of outsider stories.