Desire Makes Storytellers of Us All: Anthropica by David Hollander
What a fitting end to the postmodern literary experiment. Or are we just getting warmed up?
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Posts Tagged: Roland Barthes
Brief Moments Upon the Blank Page: Moyra Davey’s Index Cards
The collection enacts—even performs—its own coming into being.
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What to Read When You’re Trying to Hold Your Selves Together
Irena Yamboliev shares a reading list to celebrate LOOKING WAS NOT ENOUGH.
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Variants of Unknown Significance
My gynecologist won’t stop bothering me about getting a genetic test done.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with María Sonia Cristoff and Katherine Silver
Author María Sonia Cristoff and translator Katherine Silver discuss INCLUDE ME OUT.
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The Evolution of Present-Day Greece: Talking with Nanos Valaoritis
Poet and author Nanos Valaoritis discusses the political and cultural situation in Greece today.
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What Is Vibrant and Hidden: A Conversation with Jenny Boully
Jenny Boully discusses her new book, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, construction of voice, occupying liminal spaces, and editing with sincerity.
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There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles
As Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means.
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What Is Being Charted Here?: Talking with Jennifer S. Cheng
Poet and essayist Jennifer S. Cheng discusses her collection House A, working “in the dark,” and the idea of home.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Pandora and the Naked Dead Woman
Bite that apple, open that jar at your own risk and see how your garden grows, how hopeful you remain. Paradise is, after all, blissful self-ignorance.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Dugout
So much of politics is symbolic speech in the service of the syncopations of the lives we actually live. But the ways we gather to vote is with our bodies. It’s the dance that goes along with those rhythms.
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A Dying Art: Carrie & Lowell and Elegiac Practice
Elegy cannot protect us. It is merely a contained space for us to prowl, and to prowl in a performative manner.
...moreScarf as Signifier
In honor of the upcoming centennial birthday of French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes, Hermés is releasing a limited-edition scarf designed in his honor. The New Yorker will gladly demystify that commodity for you.
...moreThe Living Dead Author
How is it possible that even when I know nothing about a novelist’s life I find, on reading his or her book, that I am developing an awareness of the writer that is quite distinct from my response to the work? At the New York Review of Books, Tim Parks explores why, despite the Death […]
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New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium: Marguerite Van Cook and James Romberger
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Tuesday nights 7-9 p.m. EST in New York City.
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The Last Poem I Loved: “Separation” by W. S. Merwin
“Separation” expresses the paradoxical intersection of the instantaneous and the enduring.
...moreThe Diaries Of Roland Barthes
At The Book Bench, a moving exploration of Roland Barthes’ diaries, focusing especially on his unique handwriting: “Reading someone’s handwriting can be incredibly intimate and revealing, perhaps especially in an age of e-mail and texting. The confines of font streamline and depersonalize emotionality, in contrast with the romance of thoughtful script or the tragic desperation […]
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