Place, Patois, and a Pinch of Politics: A Conversation with Celeste Mohammed
Celeste Mohammed discusses her debut novel-in-stories, PLEASANTVIEW.
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Posts Tagged: ISIS
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Dunya Mikhail
Dunya Mikhail discusses her new collection, IN HER FEMININE SIGN.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #128: Dunya Mikhail
“All art is somehow a kind of witness, whether to beauty or to anything else.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #126: Christopher Zeischegg
“Being thrust into forced ritualistic closeness does break the ice, but doesn’t guarantee closeness.”
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TORCH: An Alien, Ineligible for Participation
That a bumbling demagogue would be able to take this institutional racism and weaponize it is, then, not really a surprise. The seeds for this hate were planted a long time ago.
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All Writing Is Political: A Conversation with Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid discusses his new novel, Exit West, hope in fiction as a form of resistance, the necessity of learning to accept social change, and how much America and Pakistan have come to resemble each other.
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War Narratives #5: Surge
But those who subscribe to the Surge narrative have to work very hard to choose and order their supporting facts.
...moreMistaken Identity
A New Age book and gift shop in Denver, Colorado called Isis Books and Gifts changed its branding after vandals smashed its sign, thinking the store was related to the Islamic State. The sign now reads “Goddess of 10,000 Names,” which is an honorific for the ancient Egyptian goddess. On Facebook, the store owner said, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Atossa Araxia Abrahamian
Atossa Araxia Abrahamian on her new book The Cosmopolites, the citizenship market, nearly getting deported in the Comoros, and learning to show up and wait.
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Joyce Carol Oates Riles Twitter
A few days ago, Joyce Carol Oates mused about the media’s coverage of ISIS with a tweet that sparked an intense debate. All we hear of ISIS is puritanical & punitive; is there nothing celebratory & joyous? Or is query naive? –Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates), November 22, 2015 The author’s tweets have invited strong reactions in […]
...moreFighting Terrorism Through Language
The terrorist organization that coordinated attacks in Paris last week has alternately been called ISIS, ISIL, and IS by government and media. However, when French President Francois Hollande addressed the world, he referred to the organization as Daesh for a very good reason: language. In addition to being a transliteration of the group’s Arabic acronym meaning […]
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R.I.P.: The Museum of Death
What strikes me is not the necrophilia or the fetal pigs or the spoon designed for scooping out human brain matter, but rather the mundane.
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) The new French Scrabble Champion doesn’t speak French. Scientists condemn the journal Science Careers for reinforcing stereotypes. Japanese activists are fighting ISIS with anime. It took 45 years to decipher a completely charred, 1500-year-old Hebrew scroll. Armadillos are […]
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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.
...moreExamining Culture
Analysts have generally ignored these texts, as if poetry were a colorful but ultimately distracting by-product of jihad. But this is a mistake. It is impossible to understand jihadism—its objectives, its appeal for new recruits, and its durability—without examining its culture. Over at the New Yorker, Robyn Creswell and Bernard Haykel examine jihadi culture through […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Portrait of a lady serial killer. Can Silicon Valley save our schools? Talking to women on the Internet is hard work. The Apple of Prisons? And that isn’t even the weird part. NPR is becoming Pandora. Battling extremism on the Internet.
...moreFragility of Antiquity
Adam Flemming Petty writes over on Electric Literature about the literature of ruins: This perception of antiquities as fragile rather than permanent, and all the more affecting for their fragility, is common in literature. Writers have often found their imaginations piqued when encountering the broken, the cracked, the falling-apart. The stories that ruins tell are […]
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Why Jihadists Love Postmodern Poetry
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire returns with a powerful take on fascism and violence and postmodernism.
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The Rumpus Interview with Luke B. Goebel
Luke B. Goebel talks about his experimental novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, his dark days in San Francisco, hands as blood-bags, and literary Ouija boards.
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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.
...moreExcavated Heartbreaking Interview with David Foster Wallace
I didn’t really understand emotionally that there are people around who didn’t have enough to eat, who weren’t warm enough, who didn’t have a place to live, whose parents beat the hell out of them regularly. The sadness isn’t in seeing it, the sadness is in realizing how phenomenally lucky I am, not only to […]
...moreISIS: 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 group, though membership primarily consists of Sunni Muslims, the “orthodox” branch of Islam and the […]
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