Moving Toward Answers: A Conversation with Stephen Mills
Poet Stephen Mills discusses his first two collections, He Do the Gay Man in Different Voices and A History of the Unmarried, teaching writing, and what’s next.
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Posts Tagged: James Joyce
What to Read When You Want to Read an “Uncomfortable” Book
Authors whose works have been challenged or banned give recommendations on other “uncomfortable” books that will make you a better person for having read them.
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Staying Syncretic: A Conversation with Kool A.D.
Kool A.D. discusses his debut novel, OK, the war on drugs, systemic destruction of left-leaning movements by the government, and the inability to escape American capitalism.
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The Rumpus Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Than Nguyen discusses his story collection The Refugees, growing up in a Vietnamese community in San Jose in the 1980s, and the power of secondhand memories.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #19: Are YOU My Hero?
This week, I’ve found myself thinking about heroism. What makes a hero, anyway? Who should we choose for our heroes? When I was around fourteen, I developed a hero crush on W. C. Fields, of all people! I was delighted when I read about the time he and John Barrymore gave a ride to a […]
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The Girl on the Bike
First, we must recognize our removal from the machinations of the shadows. The screen stands between us and the internal world depicted on it. There is no communion.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his story collection Insurrections, father relationships, hip-hop, knowing when to abandon a project, and choosing not to workshop certain stories.
...moreRunning with Ears
Derek Teslik tackles the importance of running for an author—and listening to Joyce audiobooks while doing so—in an essay over at The Millions: So, for this last run, I wanted to up the mental game somehow, maybe simulate the brutality of the last six miles without running them. What better way to test my fortitude than […]
...moreThis Year You Will Finally Read Ulysses
You don’t like to quit, but need a nudge to wade back into the novel’s overflowing streams of character consciousness, arcane references and shifting structure to follow those people going about life in Dublin on June 16, 1904. Yes, another Bloomsday has come and gone, and maybe you didn’t get around to finishing James Joyce’s […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Danniel Schoonebeek
Danniel Schoonebeek discusses living a quiet life in the Catskills, the importance of travel, partying in the woods with poets, and how capitalism forces people to be cruel to each other.
...moreProbing into the Space Between
At the New York Times, Karl Ove Knausgaard describes how Joyce’s Portrait included him in literature’s potential in a way that Ulysses didn’t: In “Portrait,” Joyce ventures inside that part of our identity for which no language yet exists, probing into the space between what belongs to the individual alone and what is ours together, exploring […]
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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.
...moreJoyce’s Forgotten Rival
For The Millions, Austin Ratner documents the relationship between the “forgotten” Irish writer James Stephens and the famed James Joyce. Despite starting as literary rivals, Joyce wanted Stephens to finish Finnegans Wake if he ever lost his eyesight. In addition, the essay examines Stephens’s influence on other well-known Irish writers, including Seán O’Casey and Eugene O’Neill.
...moreOld Books for Cold Weather
Lit Hub has been sharing excerpts of classic favorites to help weather the brutal cold—or, well, the mild cold, as is the case here in New York. Cozy up with the quiet desperation and harsh weather of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Guy de Maupassant’s “The First Snowfall.”
...moreOur Literary Footpaths
Over at The Toast, Rebecca Turkewitz writes about the intersections between literary geography and the real, from Joyce’s Dublin and Tolkien’s Middle Europe to Faulkner’s Mississippi and Munro’s Ontario—how we explore these places by walking through pages, and how they map to our homes and street corners.
...moreWWLBD?
There’s always Stephen’s classic hangover cure, “The Cabman’s Kickstart.” Simply stare with weary ennui at a stale dinner roll while insulting a cup of coffee. Over at Melville House, resident Joyce expert and author of An Exaggerated Murder, Josh Cook, is impersonating Ulysses’s hero, Leopold Bloom, and answering your most distressing questions in a new monthly advice […]
...moreConsider the Ellipsis
In the latest installment of Lexicon Valley over at Slate, Katy Waldman considers how to use an ellipsis with the aid of F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, and T.S. Eliot.
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The Rumpus Interview with Mary Karr
Mary Karr talks about her new book The Art of Memoir, the perception of memoir from a “trashy” form, the virtues of poetry, and the complexity of truth-telling.
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The Rumpus Interview with David Lipsky
David Lipsky, whose book was recently adapted into the movie The End of the Tour, discusses his career as a writer and journalist as it’s evolved in the twenty years since his road trip with David Foster Wallace.
...moreThank You, Hypertext
The book was, we can now see, crying out for the invention of the web, which would enable the holding of multiple domains of knowledge in the mind at one time that a proper reading requires. At the Guardian, Billy Mills looks at the love match that is the Internet and Finnegans Wake and has […]
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Guildtalk #1: The Rumpus Interview with Eddie Joyce
Guildtalk, brought to you by The Rumpus and the Authors Guild, brings attention to exciting new voices in American literature. The first installment features Richard Russo and Eddie Joyce.
...moreA Literary Scandal, Over 100 Years Later
The New York Review of Books looks at what makes James Joyce’s Uylsses just as scandalous today as it was when it was first published.
...moreDigitizing Reels of History
The British Library says it has a window of 15 years to preserve an invaluable cache of sound recordings, but unless fundraising can help pick up the pace, the archives could take as many as 48 to complete. The artifacts represent a range of obsolete formats, some of them long dead; from wax cylinders of […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Thomas H. McNeely
Thomas H. McNeely discusses coming of age in the 1970s, Houston’s complicated racial history, and his new novel Ghost Horse.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #59: Not a Folk Singer
There is a lot to learn from Vashti Bunyan, therefore, about how to live a self-designed life, and how to be unapologetic and decisive about the habit of songwriting.
...moreFollowing Ulysses
To what extent am I reading Ulysses by following Ulysses Reader? What does “reading” even mean at this point, given our near-constant engagement with text? Over at Full Stop, Dustin Illingworth describes his relationship with Ulysses Reader, a Twitter account posting the entire text of James Joyce’s Ulysses, 140 characters at a time.
...moreFinding Dublin in Joyce’s Dubliners
Why would a writer elicit that kind of hatred? What kind of threat did he pose? I asked my dad if I could borrow a copy of Ulysses, went to my room and began to read. An hour later I came back downstairs. Is there an easier one? I asked. That’s when he gave me […]
...more(Not Really) Pleased To Meet You
The narrative of the encounter between James Joyce and Marcel Proust gets another tile added to its mosaic. Over at the London Review of Books blog, Ben Jackson reports on the legendary meeting as told by Vladimir Nabokov to his wife Vera.
...moreAuthor Selling Postcards Written in Blood
Writing a novel requires plenty of time, and Irish author Julian Gough is hoping to fund that time with a Kickstarter campaign he has dubbed Litcoin. For small amounts of money, Gough will send contributors postcards stained with whiskey, coffee, lipstick, bullet holes, or, for a mere $500, a postcard written in his blood. Litcoin’s […]
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