Posts Tagged: literature
The Rumpus Interview with Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua discusses her debut collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, writing fiction in order to understand life as an American-born child of immigrants, and the importance of literary community.
...moreCrybaby College Students and Their Bogus Trophies
I’m a small blue dot living in a blood-red corner of a red state, so I’ve grown accustomed to hearing right wing talking points. I don’t like them, but they surface as regularly in my southwest Florida town as white egrets on the highway and dolphins in the Gulf. Talking points at the grocery store, […]
...moreThe Working Titles of Classic Lit
While the great classics studied in classrooms everywhere tend to have very memorable titles, those classics could have received slightly different treatment had their working titles been used instead. Over at Electric Literature, Carrie Mullins looks at several classics whose titles changed before publication.
...moreHow Will Our Current-Day Literature Be Studied in the Future?
With so many books winning so many prizes over the years (Nobel this, Pulitzer that), one can’t help but wonder how our generation’s sense of literature might be described in the future. What patterns and obsessions and current trends might be considered as critical to understanding our era? Over at The Huffington Post, read some answers speculating on just […]
...moreAnd the Nobel Prize in Literature Goes To…
Bob Dylan? At Electric Literature, Lincoln Michel acknowledged that no one is quite sure how to feel about the news. At Slate, Stephen Metcalf praises Bob Dylan’s genius, but argues that he’s a musician, not a poet: The objection here hinges in the definition of the word literature. You wouldn’t give the literary prize to […]
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Podcatcher #4: Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness
Jonathan Van Ness discusses his podcast, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, fierceness, curiosity, and hairstyles.
...moreLiterature’s Future Is Interactive
Tech evangelicals believe that static, non-visual storytelling like books must evolve and adapt to continue to attractive audiences in the future. Kill Screen takes a look at some of these new types of literary storytelling, like Madefire’s digital storytelling app that features animation technology, and Tapas Media, which builds games around chapters.
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The Rumpus Interview with Brendan Jones
Brendan Jones talks about his debut novel, The Alaskan Laundry, living in Alaska, his time as a Wallace Stegner Fellow, and living and loving what you write.
...moreThe Lives of Cyborgs
An automaton symbolizes the creepy resemblance between us and the clockwork mechanisms we’ve invented… and to explore the awe and apprehension of mechanical existence. Michael Peck writes for Lit Hub on the literary history of cyborgs and robots through the centuries.
...moreThe Invisible Lower Class
Raymond Carver and other “Kmart realists” championed the working class in high-brow literary fiction. But has the realism of the 99% gone out of style? Electric Literature explores.
...moreKeep Your Secrets
For Aeon, Tiffany Jenkins writes on the importance of secrets in a person’s individual development. In addition to psychological and sociological research, Jenkins traces the vital role secrets and secret-keeping plays in classical children’s literature.
...moreImmortalizing History
Literature continually reminds us that we are not alone and (to paraphrase Kundera) that things are not always as simple as they seem. With so many stories, histories, characters and figures populating a reader’s mind, it’s easy for us to take for granted the liberation that literature imparts. Considering our wide and fast access to […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Should Facebook decide what qualifies as tragedy? How can technology shape stories beyond how they are displayed? Herzog on reality. Would our Founding Fathers approve of copyright law?
...moreThe Literary Deadly Sins
For the New York Times‘s Bookends column, Rivka Galchen and Benjamin Moser muse on the question of which transgressions in literature are unforgivable: For me, the unforgivable sin in literature is the same as that in life: the assumption of certainty and the moral high ground. That words like “righteous” and “pious” are often used to […]
...moreThe Sound of Silence
So while silence can most certainly be boring, unsettling, unbearable, it can just as certainly be an aid to concentration and thus free the imagination. It can quiet the mind and open it to divine influences. This seems to depend on whether we have chosen it or it has been forced upon us. Over at Lit […]
...moreIs Writing Art or Profession?
For those who start within the establishment, professional writing is likely to correspond to drudgery, and they’ll seek to escape it. For those on the outside looking in, it’s a mark of legitimacy. The reasons behind why writers write is arguably broken into two camps: for art and as a profession. Certainly neither is more […]
...moreLiterature Is a Luxury Brand
They have a swish sounding publisher. They write for the New Yorker or the Guardian. They’re overwhelmingly likely to have attended an elite university such as Oxford or Stamford. They have an MFA. It’s all indicative of one clear message: these people are smarter than you, so you should buy their book. Genre fiction is […]
...moreShakespeare Reprised
When a piece of art inspires you, it literally in-spires, breaths into you. It makes us want to create new art. Or, maybe it’s a more basic instinct. From the beginning of our lives, when we hear a good story, a story that as Winterson says becomes “talismanic” for us, what do we say? “Tell […]
...moreReporting as Literature
Reporter and writer Svetlana Alexievich recently won the Nobel Prize for literature. In a piece for the New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch brings up some questions that this poses about the relationship between reportage literature and other forms—is one more necessary or relevant in our current times? Should one form be envious or attempt to reproduce the effects of […]
...moreCrafting Literature Out of GIFs
When a moving image is shorn from one of these videos…we are left with something that feels a little bit “real,” a little bit “fictional,” and a little bit neither. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then how many words is a GIF worth? As the GIF is rapidly becoming a dominant currency […]
...moreEbooks Are Changing How Writers Write
The rise in popularity of e-books are changing how readers consume books. Readers now have short attention spans, and that is leading to writers adopting new styles. The Guardian takes a look at the impact of the rise of e-books on new works.
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) It’s dubious whether these parents read either book. It’s not personal, it’s just privileged. Fact-checking the infamous nail salon story. Being bored in literature. A professor warns students away from the University of Wisconsin. Roxane Gay on the […]
...moreThe End of Literature
The rapid rise of “trigger warnings” is starting to impact literature curriculums. For instance, Columbia University students lobbied to include warnings on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a core text in Western Literature syllabi. Columbia refused to include warnings, but essentially capitulated by expunging the text from its curriculum entirely. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita were […]
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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.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Reading Don Quijote with My Mother
“That’s the anthem I would have sung at my original graduation if the university had stayed open,” my mother said.
...moreWord of the Day: Didascalic
(adj.); intended to teach; related to teaching or education “How did it come to be … that ‘those of us for whom English is a line of work are also called upon to love literature and ensue that others do so, too’?” –Dora Zhang, “Love, Loot, and Lit.” “We don’t expect,” writes Dora Zhang, “a […]
...moreBrazil Strikes Back
Young Brazilian novelist Daniel Galera has just been translated into English for the first time. Over at the Globe and Mail, Chris Frey wonders if Blood-Drenched Beard will be a breakout moment for Brazilian literature.
...moreThe Magic Building Where English Majors Work
A professor of undergraduate and graduate creative writing for twenty years, Cathy Day gives some practical advice for students at The Millions, admitting while English majors don’t work in a “magic building,” the degree does have some often overlooked benefits.
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