The Real People: A Conversation with Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai discusses her forthcoming third novel, The Great Believers, how she arrived at the book’s structure, and the story and its characters.
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Posts Tagged: paris
SquareRoot of Love, Politics, and Power
If we really believe that love is important and necessary then where is it, especially when it comes to world politics and power?
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Looking for Ghosts: A Conversation with John Freeman
John Freeman discusses his debut collection of poetry, Maps, displacement, empathy, and trying to find a way forward in the nation and the world.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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An Erasure of Distance: Traveling in Circles with Nathan Englander
Nathan Englander talks about his new novel, Dinner at the Center of the Earth, the experience of being interviewed, and why he believes books can save lives.
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Swinging Modern Sounds #82: Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark: A Symposium
…yet she did what she did, and in the process made the most successful album of her career.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #32: Make the Soup
I am meditating. In a room in Rodeo, at the rickety old secretary/dresser I use as a desk. It is by a window. I look out at the roadway, and think I am glad to live at a crossroad. The house across the street is silver grey. By its front stoop is a tree all […]
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Chen Chen
Chen Chen discusses his new collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, playing the game white supremacy has set up, and if God is trying and failing to be a cool dad.
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Back to the Places I’ve Left
“No one knows how to handle it,” I tell her, but I can see she’s angry and I’m speaking into the wind.
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The Rumpus Interview with Joe Okonkwo
Joe Okonkwo discusses his debut novel Jazz Moon, the quest for self-discovery, creative inspiration, and what it means to build a family when home is so very far away.
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The Rumpus Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Than Nguyen discusses his story collection The Refugees, growing up in a Vietnamese community in San Jose in the 1980s, and the power of secondhand memories.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lauren Elkin
Writer and academic Lauren Elkin discusses her latest book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice and London, the freedoms and constraints of urban space for women, and the power of first person.
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: E. A. Longfellow
The way I think about my writing is similar to the way I think about my kink—both have to do with history and the ethics around appropriation.
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A Meer-Kin in Paris
Her face lit up, and I checked to make sure the man’s scowl had returned. It wasn’t enough for me that heaven should exist for the wife; her husband had to end up in hell.
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SquareRoot of Love: Valentine’s Day in Paris – A WinePoetryFilm Project
Love. Because our collective survival depends on it.
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Natural Born Drivers
He only knew that the Blazer, like the green card, was something he wanted my brother and me to have, so that we knew we deserved things, things like America.
...moreJulia Deck on the Game of Writing
To me, writing a book is also creating a game for both myself and the reader. Over at the Believer Logger, Natasha Boas talks to Julia Deck, author of Viviane Élisabeth Fauville, about unreliable narrators, conciseness, titles, Paris, French publishing houses, and mysteries.
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America Again
I felt urgently that it was the moment to tell the story of what I’ve learned about American music—or maybe about being an American.
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A Man’s ABCs of Miscarriage
I once heard the only thing faster than the speed of light is the speed of thought, and I wonder if simply thinking about Sawyer’s sister until my head hurts could get us to the place we fear talking about.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
The Feminist Bookstore made famous by Portlandia has kicked the show out, saying the show “throws trans femmes under the bus.” Specialty bookstores are finding that filling a niche is often the best way to survive the onslaught of online competition. Parisian bookstore Shakespeare and Company turns sixty-five, and OUT takes a look back through store’s famed […]
...moreParis and All That Jazz
While Fitzgerald’s haunts have certainly evolved over the years, and some have disappeared altogether, visitors to Paris can still relive the old-fashioned glamor of Fitzgerald’s Paris. It requires imagination, champagne, and a touch of despair. In an article for Travel + Leisure, Jess McHugh writes about the Paris of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and how visitors […]
...moreA Productive Unhappiness
Why is it that knowing how to remain alone in Paris for a year in a miserable room teaches a man more than a hundred literary salons and forty years’ experience of ‘Parisian life’? Over at the Paris Review Daily, Alice Kaplan, author of the new biography Looking for the Stranger, writes about Albert Camus’s […]
...moreThe Beats Come to Paris (Again)
The French obsession with America popular culture takes form at the Pompidou Center in Paris with relics from the Beat Generation, including the famous 120-foot scroll of Kerouac’s On the Road, in a comprehensive exhibit. Frank Rose reports the details for the New York Times.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Christine Sneed
Floyd Skloot interviews Christine Sneed about her latest story collection, The Virginity of Famous Men.
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R.I.P.: Naiveté
Nearly a decade ago, on what was then my first and only day in Paris, I saw a dead person for the first time.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
The project to bring a second bookstore to Queens, New York has met its Kickstarter goal. The borough of 2.2 million people was down to a single bookstore, Astoria Bookshop, after a Forest Hills Barnes & Noble closed. Bangkok has a thriving bookstore scene. Amazon targets New York City’s literary scene with a brick and […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
One of the missing Hong Kong booksellers has been returned, and gave a speech warning about the power of China’s central government and the waning independence of Hong Kong. Tiny, the cat that lives in Brooklyn’s Community Bookstore, had a big adventure in the city—he disappeared, causing panic among the store’s employees, before deciding to […]
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Reading Mademoiselle Gantrel
We squinted into the smoky room and saw ourselves on junior year abroad, frolicking on the Left Bank with artists in berets like hers.
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The Rumpus Interview with William Hjorstberg
William Hjorstberg talks about his new book, the heady writing days in Livingstone, Montana, being a “Hollywood whore,” and the finer points of Richard Brautigan.
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The Rumpus Interview with Cole Swensen
Cole Swensen, author of fifteen collections of poetry, discusses her work, walking, and her recent travels.
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