language
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Weekly Geekery
Lizard brain, meet the one-sentence novel. Sea slugs: the key to why you’ll remember this article. Are millenials “empty inside”? New books reveal the truth!
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My Voice for Their Drugs
Anxiety disorients me from inside. My heart moves so erratically I’m afraid it will give out, my breath so staggered I have to remind myself to take in air.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce
Iben Mondrup and Kerri Pierce discuss the translation of Justine, Mondrup’s 2012 Danish novel about a young artist in Denmark.
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Arrival: A Metaphor for Polemic Times
We are disconnected. Connection fails when we fail to take the time to literally, and therefore metaphorically, see each other.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Such a Thing
The future perfect tense indicates an action that is certain to occur. But when the future is not perfect or certain, the conditional “would” is more appropriate.
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Fitting Characters and Scripts
Unwittingly, my mother teaches me in this conversation her generation’s word for gay: 同性恋. I look it up in an online dictionary, three characters in my mother’s tongue. Same, sex, and love.
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The Rumpus Interview with Vi Khi Nao
Vi Khi Nao on her new novel Fish in Exile, why women shouldn’t apologize (even when they’re wrong), moving between genres, and why humor is vital in a novel full of darkness and grief.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Never Let Me Go
“You can’t hold on to the past,” Elif once told me. “You don’t know how. You don’t know what to keep, what to throw away. So you keep it all. And you can’t do that. No one can.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Adam Morris
Adam Morris discusses Quiet Creature on the Corner, a novel he translated from the Brazilian by João Gilberto Noll, the choices he makes as a translator, and the unique narrative structure of Noll’s writing.
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Exclamation Points Are Feminist!
Friendly emails are a sign of progress, not weakness, in our working lives. Policing women’s use of language is over (we wish). But at the Huffington Post, Angelina Chapin argues that women’s use of exclamation marks in the workplace represents…
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“A Star That Peers Through Your Window”
German children’s book author Thomas Mac Pfeifer spent over a year interviewing children who had migrated to Germany from war-stricken countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan with the purpose of hearing and collecting their favorite bedtime stories into one…
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The Words We Use to Describe Life Stories
To an English-speaker, the difference between “autobiography” and “memoir” seems intuitive. But in German, there’s no equivalent of the word “memoir.” At Lit Hub, Tara Bray Smith muses on the distinction between the two genres, and what it tells us…