Writing toward Meaning: A Conversation with Ethel Rohan
Ethel Rohan discusses her new story collection, IN THE EVENT OF CONTACT.
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Posts Tagged: Oscar Wilde
ENOUGH: Flesh and Bone and Ash
A Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary writers that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #187: Evan James
“The way it turned out is a total surprise to me.”
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The Torment of Queer Literature
Queer literature isn’t a box to unlock so that it can unlock me.
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The Thread: The Masked Man
What I know and don’t know about men matters. What men know and don’t know about themselves matters more.
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Finding Freedom
We never want something more than when it has been taken away from us. The opposite of freedom is confinement.
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Every Woman Is a Nation unto Herself: A Conversation with Sabina Murray
Sabina Murray discusses the novel Valiant Gentleman, writing characters that are fundamentally different from herself, and confronting issues of colonization.
...moreIn Conversation with Anne Carson
If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it. Kate Kellaway interviews poet Anne Carson for the Guardian, touching on reliability, Oscar Wilde, and passing phases like boxing. Carson’s newest collection, Float, is now available, and she has just appeared in the newly launched Penguin Modern Poets Series.
...moreDreaming of Oscar
Katherine you must come to my table. I’ve got Oscar Wilde there. He’s the most marvelous man I ever met. He’s splendid! Over at the Paris Review Daily, Dan Piepenbring posted an excerpt from Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 letter to her husband describing a dream in which she met the playwright Oscar Wilde.
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The Rumpus Interview with Alexander Chee
Alexander Chee talks about opera, the Wild West, and the charismatic women of 19th-century France that inspired his new novel The Queen of the Night.
...moreWas Oscar Wilde Unoriginal?
“Oscar,” Whistler’s barbs continued, “has the courage of the opinions… of others!” The Public Domain Review looks at the accusations of plagiarism that dogged Oscar Wilde’s oft-quoted career, and his highly-publicized feud with the American artist James McNeill Whistler.
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Demystifying Stereotypes
What exactly is a “stereotype”? Over at the Ploughshares blog, Brett Beasley explains what the word really means, and where it comes from, with a little help from Oscar Wilde.
...moreBefore There Was Facebook, There Was Oscar Wilde with a Yellow Handkerchief
In January 1882, before he wrote “The Importance of Being Earnest, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or any of the great works for which we honor him today,” Oscar Wilde went on a tour throughout the United States, lecturing about interior decorating, craft-making, and home aesthetics. In Washington, Henry James, always envious of the young […]
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Repetition
I have long been more comfortable with questions than answers. I like a storyline that is left open as opposed to one that ties up neatly.
...moreMy Life In Books Besides Middlemarch
Looking back on her reading life in her late teens, the New Yorker’s Rebecca Mead discusses the “flawed and pernicious division” between books read for pleasure and books read “because we have to,” because they’re part of the established literary canon.
...moreOscar Wilde, Journalist
The famous playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde also spent a number of years in journalism. Scholars John Stokes and Mark W. Turner are finally collecting Wilde’s journalism from the 1880s. Little is known of Wilde’s life at this time, but the articles he left behind reveal Wilde’s varied interests, reports the Times Literary Supplement, and […]
...moreWhere Betty Byrne Lived
Story is an integral part of the city of Dublin. Bronze statues of beloved writers roam the landscape, immortal: Wilde lounges “languidly on a crag in the park at Merrion Square,” while Joyce is “depicted rather more severely in bronze, leaning on his cane as he strolls down North Earl Street.” Ever wondered what the tower in the opening scene of […]
...moreLet’s Face It: Oscar Wilde Would Have Ruled Twitter
“@MargaretAtwood @JoyceCarolOates @nycnovel @NathanEnglander @Shteyngart and I are fine with Twitter,” Salman Rushdie recently declared to the anti-social-media Jonathan Franzen. If famous authors of the past had been fine with Twitter, what would they have tweeted? Bookish has some ideas.
...moreReal-Life Time-Traveling Fanfic
The Toast set social media on fire with a piece of literary gossip this week, and like all the best literary gossip, it’s over 100 years old. Here it is: Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde totally hooked up. Maybe. Probably. “I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips”? Come on.
...moreEmily Dickinson: Karaoke Queen?
For Bookish, music writer and self-described “karaoke ho” Rob Sheffield lists which songs famous authors of the past would have belted out on karaoke night. He’s unquestionably right about Oscar Wilde crooning something from The Smiths, though it seems a missed opportunity not to have given James Joyce “Baby Got Back.” Which tunes do you […]
...moreThe Weird, Sad, Beautiful Lives of “Wayward Authors”
Writers aren’t exactly known for taking the road more traveled by, and the authors profiled in Andrew Shaffer’s Literary Rogues are no exception. There’s Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s proclivity for opium, Gustave Flaubert’s exhibitionism, and of course, Oscar Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name. Writes NPR’s Monkey See blog: …what is most remarkable about Shaffer’s […]
...moreA trip to The Wilde West
When Oscar Wilde visited America, he met with writers like Walt Whitman and Henry James. But during his trip, his playful quips that many of us have come to love, actually seemed to annoy many Americans more than delight them. Anthony Paletta’s essay “Wilde Ride” discusses Wilde’s encounters with famous Americans, his witticisms on American culture […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Elissa Schappell
Elissa Schappell and I met too many years ago to say, at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. We were both waiters, which means that you serve students, scholars, fellows and faculty, and you either watch people behave badly or you behave badly with them. Even on little sleep and instant mashed potatoes, Elissa enthralled us […]
...moreTeleny and Camille
A story of gay erotica often traced to Oscar Wilde has been made into a luscious graphic novel, courtesy of Nefarismo illustrator Jon Macy.
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Blog is a fun word to say, even if I’m tired of hearing other people say it. Eggers on Salinger. Michaelangelo’s poem “When the Author Was Painting the Vault of the Sistene Chapel.” (via) “Hey Oscar Wilde! It’s Clobbering Time!” Jacket Copy has fun with illustrators’ pictures of their favorite literary figures and characters. “If […]
...more“Sonnet like allusions are made to your gilt silk hair”
Next week, 600,000 pages of manuscripts, letters, drafts and journals will be put online from canonical British authors like Oscar Wilde, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens and others. Included will be correspondence between Wilde and many of his lovers, including Lord Alfred Douglas, or “Bosie.” The Marquis of Queensbury, Bosie’s father, despised Wilde, and Wilde […]
...moreThe Rumpus Book Blog Roundup
It is spring, and the book blogs are horny! Will they be the type to lock themselves in a room with a suitcase full of porn? Or will they find someone who looks lonely and hit on them, not leaving the poor person alone until they agree to make out? Below the fold, find out […]
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