The Past Is All We Have: André Aciman’s Homo Irrealis
Is it not in the warm chambers of the past, after all, that we are immortal, invincible, and alive?
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Posts Tagged: proust
The Meaning Is in the Scale: Talking with David Adjmi
David Adjmi discusses his new memoir, LOT SIX.
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Agency and Wonder: Amina Cain’s Indelicacy
To read Amina Cain is to enter tide pools of the mind.
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The Brain Wants What It Wants: Talking with Elisa Gabbert
Elisa Gabbert discusses her newest book, THE WORD PRETTY.
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The House of Fiction Has Many Rooms: Talking with Sigrid Nunez
Sigrid Nunez discusses her seventh novel, The Friend, her fondness for writing about animals, and the ways the literary world has changed.
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Language Is All Convention: Talking with Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman discusses her new novel The Idiot, what it means to be a writer, and the artifice of language.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #30: Walk On
This Tuesday was, by no means, a good news day. The night before was the tragedy in Manchester, England, at which a suicide bomber killed children at a pop concert. But, sad as it is, that is not the story that moved me, on this beautiful Tuesday, to tears. I care, but at this point […]
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(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: Claire Rudy Foster
It is about the essential parts of story. The bones. The steel rods and rings. The skin that goes white with tension. Tolerating that kind of discomfort takes practice, yes, but it is exhilarating.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #72: Laurie Sheck
Laurie Sheck is the author, most recently, of Island of the Mad, and A Monster’s Notes, a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for The Willow Grove, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the […]
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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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The Rumpus Interview with Gregory Pardlo
Poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Gregory Pardlo discusses the reverence for poetry found in other cultures, how he strings a book together, and the future of American poetry in light of our national crisis.
...moreComing Home to Proust
At The Millions, J.P. Smith describes the singular effect that Marcel Proust has had on his growth as a writer: This isn’t a rambling, stream-of-consciousness book of memories lost and found; it’s a novel with a subtle and solid architecture, where in its last volume, Time Regained, the shape of the work comes finally into focus.
...moreTell Me about Yourself
Do you love this shit? Are you high right now? Do you ever get nervous? Quizzes are everywhere these days, from meandering author interviews to hard-hitting investigations to exactly which Disney princess corresponds to your introverted spirit animal. Read about the now-ubiquitous model’s Proustian origins over at the New Yorker.
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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.
...more140 Characters or More
Make sure no one else is awake. Turn off the lights. Your windows can stay open. Now turn on your phone and begin reading. Repeat as necessary each night. Do not stop until the very last word of the very last volume. For the Atlantic, Sarah Boxer recounts the unexpectedly Proustian experience of finally finishing In […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Keith Lee Morris
Keith Lee Morris discusses his latest book Traveler’s Rest, Lewis and Clark, and how writing a novel about dreams requires much more than sleep.
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The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell discusses his debut novel, What Belongs to You, crossing boundaries, language as defense, and the queer tradition of novel writing that blurs boundaries between fiction and essay and autobiography.
...moreMaking Up for Lost Time
For The Millions, Hannah Gersen recalls past attempts to read Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and explains why she came up short. The essay also serves as an announcement for a new series, in which Gersen will once again attempt to tackle Proust and write monthly posts about her impressions.
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Against Realism
What is it Ferrante has that American fiction lacks?
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My Evenings Reading Alone
For nearly ten years I had lain beside him: the snoring was a blow, but, looking back, it was also a necessary portent, an etch in our story, the fuzzy spot on a picture frame you can’t tell is from the photograph aging or a fingerprint that left its caressing mark on the glass.
...moreLooking Back to Modernism
At the Guardian, novelist Julian Barnes shares his experiences developing a taste for art during his childhood, and how modernism worked to change his early impressions of what art could be. In addition, he offers insight as to how modernist art has come to influence his work, as well as the works of Flaubert and […]
...moreThe Joy of Knausgaard
For Flavorwire, Jonathon Sturgeon works to define “contemporary” literature and wonders where Karl Knausgaard’s My Struggle fits into the mix. What he ultimately argues is that contemporary literature is often “project based,” and that Knausgaard’s self-exploratory novel is the most definitive example of this kind of work in recent times: Not only does the title My Struggle claim for Knausgaard the […]
...moreWhat Dreams May Come
In a culture where everything is assigned a market value, imagination isn’t in high demand. Over at The Millions, Chloe Benjamin wonders why some of imagination’s most vivid manifestations—dreams and fiction—fall so low on our priority list: But in the absence of conclusive evidence, sleep’s utility—like that of fiction—is still in doubt. How much, in […]
...moreSelf-Help That’s No Help
At The New Republic, Esther Breger takes a look at literary self-help books, including How Proust Can Change Your Life and Give War and Peace a Chance.
...moreThe Trouble with Translating Proust
For the Boston Review, Leland de la Durantaye assesses the latest edition of Proust’s Swann’s Way. Writing more than just a book review, Durantaye outlines some of Proust’s early struggles, as well as his lasting legacy, and delves into the finer points of the art of translation.
...moreThe Accidental Buddhist
“When writing a book once about the Dalai Lama, I was startled to realize that the very core of one of his lessons was expressed for me by none other than the pampered-sounding Frenchman, who notes, at the very beginning of his final volume, as if to put things in perspective, “For in this world […]
...more“Ginger Is Good For Taking Care of Yourself”
“It feels like cheating,” Larissa Pham says in a Gawker essay titled “In My Shopping Cart,” “to write about culture by writing about food.” But it reads like anything but cheating. Pham wheels us through the grocery aisles of her memory, pointing out the Vietnamese food her family made with American ingredients, childhood treats with […]
...moreBAKED MEMORIES
Proust left out one important detail: the recipe. And no one ever asked him for it. We all know the famous passage of Marcel Proust’s “Remembrance of Things Past” in which the author’s mind flies back to childhood after tasting a madeleine dipped in warm tea. What we don’t know is: how exactly was a […]
...moreThe Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
Like Proust, David Mitchell examines how the incidents of a person’s life fit together, how the different parts of the world come to form one world.
...moreYour Occasional Roundup Of Death
Writing and reading does me a lot of good because it acquaints me with death in totally vicarious ways. Which is good, because I love life more than I know what to do with. Often in what I write, there’s lots of dying and disease and misfortune and sorrow. And this isn’t because that’s what […]
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