Jorge Luis Borges
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Andrew Bertaina
“Life is incredibly sad, but it’s also funny, joyful, wonderful, and strange.”
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The Light Endures: 13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins
Grief begs to be analogized, not to be tamed exactly, but somehow made approachable.
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Between Lightness and Shadow: A Conversation with Kapka Kassabova
Kapka Kassabova discusses her latest book, TO THE LAKE.
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Poetry as Archeology: Talking with Roy G. Guzmán
Roy G. Guzmán discusses their debut collection, CATRACHOS.
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How We Write the Dead: A Conversation with Vikram Paralkar
Vikram Paralkar discusses his debut novel, NIGHT THEATER.
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It’s All Metaphorical: A Conversation with Laurette Folk
Laurette Folk discusses her new collection, Totem Beasts, the role of meditation and dreams in her work, and “seeking some heightened experience in the conscious world.”
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Cook the Books
Cook’s portraits are usually accompanied by texts distilled from interviews she conducts with her subjects (afterward, she says, because she prefers the shoot itself to remain as meditative as possible). This provides her, and her audience, with a verbal layer…
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Defeat
It never occurred to me to try to write poems without the guidance of other poets and poems.
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The National Book of America, According to Borges
The English tend to be reserved, reticent, but Shakespeare flows like a great river, he abounds in hyperbole and metaphor—he’s the complete opposite of an English person. Or, in Goethe’s case, we have the Germans who are easily roused to…
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Powerhouse Spanish Literary Agent Remembered
The New Yorker has a retrospective on Carmen Balcells, a Spanish literary agent who brought writers like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Jorge Luis Borges to international fame. Balcells passed away last week at the age of 85. Balcells…
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Rewrite, Reboot, Remix
Rewriting the classics has become a stale and risk-averse strategy. But that shouldn’t spoil the fun of our larger culture of remixing.
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Step Inside Borges’s Library of Every Book That Will Ever Be Written
“For every rational line or forthright statement there are leagues of senseless cacophony, verbal nonsense, and incoherency.” No, that’s not Jonathan Franzen grumbling about the Internet—it’s a line from “The Library of Babel,” a short story written by Jorge Luis…