James Baldwin
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This Week in Short Fiction
The news of Michael Brown’s death cannot be ignored. When one of our young people dies from shots fired by a police officer, there will be sadness and confusion. There will inevitably be questions, and questions left unanswered will lead…
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The 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,…
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The Rumpus Book Club Interviews Hilton Als
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Hilton Als about his new collection White Girls, an intriguing amalgam of fiction, essay, and memoir.
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The Power of Fiction
But what I loved most about Baldwin’s writing was that he didn’t make me feel, as a young white guy, that I had no right to be thriving on his work and taking it all so personally… I could see…
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Homophobia in Hip-Hop
Rumpus pal W. Kamau Bell talked to prominent hip-hop video-blogger Jay Smooth in an interview spotlighted over at Racialicious. The two discuss homophobia in hip-hop and the eminent wisdom of black queer icons like James Baldwin, Bayard Rustin, and Audre…
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How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America by Kiese Laymon
Stacie Williams reviews Kiese Laymon’s HOW TO SLOWLY KILL YOURSELF AND OTHERS IN AMERICA today in The Rumpus Book Review.
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Happy Birthday, James Baldwin!
Happy birthday to James Baldwin, who would have been 89 today. A pioneering author of fiction, essays, plays, and poetry, Baldwin explored what it meant to be black and gay long before such themes became acceptable to the mainstream. He…
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Some Queer Writers of Color
This dovetails nicely with Roxane Gay’s post about writers of color: a list of writers of color who are also queer. “I thought, I’m sure I can come up with 50 books by LGBT people of color,” writes the post’s author.…
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THE BLURB #18: The Long Haul
Though I have doubted my talent, I’ve never doubted my conviction that this was the path I had to be on. Writing is like my Siamese twin: freakish, alive, weighty, uncanny. Were we to be separated, I doubt that I…
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The Last Book I Loved: Another Country
The beauty in Another Country is that it permits a reader to at once lament and celebrate the ways in which we use each other to further our own ideas of self.