The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Barber
Poet Jennifer Barber discusses loss, identity, historical trauma, and her newest collection, Works on Paper.
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Posts Tagged: new yorker
As a Matter of Fact
The New Yorker’s Jill Lepore laments the devaluation of truth in politics with the rise of “big data”: The era of the fact is coming to an end: the place once held by “facts” is being taken over by “data.” This is making for more epistemological mayhem, not least because the collection and weighing of […]
...moreWomen Writers, Whatever That Means
I had considered envying men before—I pretend to envy things like their higher incidence of ungrounded confidence and monomania, but I don’t really envy those things, and I’m not sure I even believe in them… In an excerpt published in the New Yorker from her forthcoming book, Rivka Galchen writes about her first experience of real […]
...moreA Crucial Conversation with the Self
For a black woman in a white world, a conversation with the self is crucial: for when she walks through that often-unwelcoming world she is subjected to confining perceptions of who she might be. When that world insists on racist and narrow paradigms, the diary gives these women a chance to scratch out and rewrite […]
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The Rumpus Review of The Big Short
My reading of the audience’s reaction to the bombast of The Big Short is not that people genuinely find the story amusing, but rather, that we are experiencing discomfort while simultaneously expecting to be entertained.
...moreExamining the Dictionary for Sexism
We need to know that the dictionary, as an institution, has a cultural power beyond the sum of its parts…And that does carry with it a responsibility to realize that we exist within that tension, and to not always hide behind the idea of descriptivist lexicography Over at the New Yorker, Nora Caplan-Bricker compiles stories […]
...moreThe Work That Remains to Be Done
“I keep trying to imagine a universe in which too many public figures declaring themselves feminists would be a bad thing,” Roxane Gay, the novelist and the author of an essay collection entitled “Bad Feminist,” wrote, before concluding, “Of all the words that should be spoken more, ‘feminist’ should be at the top of the […]
...moreThe Id’s Id
If the id had an id, and it wrote poetry, the results might sound like “Widening Income Inequality,” Frederick Seidel’s sixteenth collection. The New Yorker examines the poetry (and unabashed privilege) of Frederick Seidel.
...moreFirst Comes Love…
Over at the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman explores how men and women authors write about marriage. Citing examples from Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, and many others, Waldman writes: Ideas about love, about its essential nature and its causes, are highly idiosyncratic and often unstable. And yet, among the endless variations, romantic […]
...moreInsincerity and False Candor
For the New Yorker, David Denby listens to Jane Austen’s Emma and reflects on how listening to the book highlights the insincerity of the its characters: Austen was one of the first modern writers, one of the first thoroughly to understand the unconscious and such things as insincerity and false candor. She understood that we are almost invariably […]
...moreTropical Islands of Privilege
Over at the New Yorker, Ottessa Moshfegh has a new short story, “The Beach Boy.” Moshfegh also sat down with Deborah Treisman to talk further about her writing: Isn’t it hilarious when people are blind to their own arrogance? For some, no amount of American liberal-arts education, charitable contributions, or hours spent listening to NPR will ever wake them […]
...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 […]
...moreCanonized Outrage
Can one speak about suffering if one hasn’t experienced it? Kenneth Goldsmith has long been a figure of tension in the literary community: at once a savior for the conceptual intellectualists and avant-garde, and a malicious clown bent on provocation and appropriation. In a profile for the New Yorker, Alec Wilkinson dives into Goldsmith’s humble […]
...moreHigh-Priced Higher Education
Another school year has begun leading to age old questions like: is this degree worth it? The New Yorker takes a look at college degrees and how over the last century, the liberal arts degree that once served as a ticket to white-collar, upper-middle-class careers has since become a basic resume builder for service jobs […]
...moreLitmags Prevail
Once your journal exists, it will wing its way into a world already full of journals, like a paper airplane into a recycling bin, or onto a Web already crowded with literary sites. Why would you do such a thing? People have been starting literary magazines for centuries—and they certainly don’t do it for the […]
...moreThe Other Elizabeth Taylor
Men write to me and ask for a picture of me in my bikini. My husband thinks I should send one and shake them, but I have not got a bikini. The New Yorker profiles Elizabeth Taylor (the famed novelist, not the famed actress) and explores her lasting influence.
...moreDante for Days
All of Italy, it seems, is gearing up for a serious, extended celebration in honor of the 750th birthday of the beloved poet Dante Alighieri. John Kleiner writes for the New Yorker about the festivities and the country’s intense relationship with Dante, and attempts to put it all in context for an American audience: The […]
...moreLife, Death, and Jokes
When I drew my last breath, no one saw me. The car that hit me drove quickly away, and a driver stopped to carry me out of the center of the road. I was already dead when he carried me, so I can say I died alone.” Sheila Heti has a new, amazing short story […]
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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.
...moreRepressed Reading
That night, I found myself seriously questioning this assumption I’d held since childhood: “You have to try to forget that while you’re reading.” You do? Why? And, more to the point, how? How do you approach literature when you find it racist or elitist? Starting from her teaching experience, Elif Batuman tries to answer that question […]
...moreThe USPS Doesn’t Know Its Angelou Quotes
After the United States Postal Service misattributed a quote to Maya Angelou on a commemorative stamp, many suggested that the Postal Service “had simply believed too readily what they read on the Internet.” Now, for the New Yorker, Ian Crouch argues that although the Postal Service received approval from the Angelou family to publish the quote, the […]
...moreSave the Birds: A Rumpus Roundup
Jonathan Franzen is an avid bird lover, as anyone who read Freedom might have guessed. Two weeks ago, Franzen wrote a piece for the New Yorker that, among other things, condemned the Audubon Society for focusing too much on climate change and not enough on conservation, the society’s original mission. Focusing on climate change is […]
...moreProust’s Imperfections
For the New Yorker’s “Page Turner,” Adam Gopnik argues “why an imperfect version of Proust is a classic in English.”
...moreKeep Warburg Weird
The future of the Warburg Institute, one of London’s most influential and strangest libraries, is examined at length in this week’s New Yorker. Adam Gopnik covers the history of the center, from its founding in pre-Nazi Germany through the height of its influence on the world of art history, and attempts to articulate the particular […]
...moreWaves and Illusions
On the latest New Yorker fiction podcast, Etgar Keret treats listeners to a reading of Donald Barthelme’s “Chablis”. Afterwards, he and Deborah Treissman chat about voice, babies, and how writing short stories is a little like surfing.
...moreBlack and White and Black
Over at the New Yorker, Zadie Smith tackles Key and Peele: The two men are physically incongruous. Key is tall, light brown, dashingly high-cheek-boned, and L.A. fit; Peele is shorter, darker, more rounded, cute like a Teddy bear. Peele, who is thirty-five, wears a nineties slacker uniform of sneakers, hoodie, and hipster specs. Key is […]
...moreHalf a Century Later
Down at the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh asks where the black critics are (and whether we ever had any to begin with, and how the field is irrelevant until they come back): Sociologists who study black America have a name for these camps: those who emphasize the role of institutional racism and economic circumstances are known […]
...moreBetter than the Book
Film adaptations can take their source novels in a million different directions, some innovative, others painfully off the mark. John Colapinto evaluates the movie versions of different Nabokov stories for the New Yorker, exploring their various formal challenges and triumphs.
...moreThe Original Comments Section
For the New Yorker, Lauren Collins looks at what she calls “the original comments section”—old notes written in the margins of books—and our modern obsession with them.
...moreNew York, Collected
At the New Yorker, Valeria Luiselli gives us an essay in defense of monuments, libraries, park benches, daughters, Dickinson, and ‘simplicissimusses’: In that first New York of my early twenties, I decided that I despised writers who admitted to crying over art or beauty or solitude, those who indulged in elevated states of mind. I […]
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