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Welcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreWelcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your community, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just awareness of […]
...moreWell, it’s been one week under the Trump administration, and already we are living in a land of “alternative facts.” After Kellyanne Conway used the term to defend Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s falsehoods regarding the inauguration crowd size on Sunday, the American people were, understandably, reminded of George Orwell’s 1984, and sales of the book […]
...moreWelcome to This Week in Trumplandia. Check in with us every Thursday for a weekly roundup of the most pertinent and relevant content on our country, which is currently spiraling down a crappy, toilet drain. You owe it to yourself, your communities, and your humanity to contribute whatever you can, even if it is just […]
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The film only grazes the issue, but homophobia is the fuel of the harassment that the targets face.
...moreThese and many other stories hope to remind us that the freedom to choose our own reading is a form of resistance against the looming threat of a totalitarian state… YA literature has situated itself as one of the most influential genres in publishing, with more adults reading YA than ever, and young adults being the most “literate” […]
...moreIn a Salon interview, authors Teddy Wayne and Alexandra Kleeman talk to each other about their recent books, character- and world-building, and alienation and anxiety in their novels. “Every story I write begins with a different distribution of knowns and unknowns, which I try to assess before I begin writing,” Kleeman says. “I’ve never gone […]
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Leland Cheuk discusses his novel The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong, dark humor, cancer, morally corrupt characters, and his mother.
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We are in a chaotic mess of a world, and our lives are going to be chaotic messes no matter how victorious and shiny we manage to become.
...moreMost of the rest of the stories in What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours are linked, with major characters in one story later turning up as minor characters in another. This loose, multiracial, polymorphously perverse, generation-spanning cast lives mostly in present-day England, but they have roots elsewhere. Anton grew up in “a country that’s not even sure […]
...moreHenry James found in the stories of Constance Fenimore Woolson “a remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling on the part of one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and analyzed.” There’s a roll call of rediscovered and canonical women writers at Salon. From Clarice Lispector and Lucia Berlin, to Zora Neale […]
...moreOnce I decided I wasn’t going to stop if I flinched, I figured I was opening myself up to some hard stuff. So, when it came, I kind of expected it. Maybe some of the beautiful moments of my life surprised me. Because I knew it was going to be a dark book. But I’ve been […]
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Bruce Bauman discusses his latest book, Broken Sleep, why rock isn’t dead (yet), how humor makes life bearable, and why we should reinstate the draft.
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I’m just back from Iowa, writing about the Democratic Caucus for Salon. You know what will make you think about citizenry? Watching hundreds of working-class union members standing in the harsh wind and freezing rain waiting to get in to a Hillary Clinton rally in an overheated high school gym in Cedar Rapids. Watching them […]
...moreThe housewife is to the novelist what the still life is to the painter. For the Slate Book Review, Laura Miller writes a piece exploring the history and resurgence of a beloved literary archetype: the housewife, often made profound by great writers from Flaubert to Jenny Offill.
...moreOver at Salon, Erik Anderson tackles the “implicit whiteness of Literature,” hoping for a VIDA-like count devoted to writers of color.
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Debra Monroe talks about her new memoir, My Unsentimental Education, the future of the genre, and how the Internet has changed what it means to be human.
...moreLast week, author and Star Trek actor Wil Wheaton wrote an essay about the seven things he did to reboot his life. The Huffington Post, a publisher recently purchased by Verizon Communications for $4.4 billion, offered Wheaton the opportunity to republish the essay in exchange for the “unique platform and reach our site provides.” Wheaton […]
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Behold: the “Cool Girl” of commercials.
...moreSalon asked six authors with new books the same questions. From Maris Kreizman to Susan Cheever, it’s no surprise they all had very different (and very fitting) answers.
...moreBy writing Luz as a reluctant maternal figure, Watkins has tapped into the lean but vital tradition of fictional ambivalent mothers. The Rumpus’s own Lyz Lenz tackles maternal ambivalence in fiction in a review of Claire Vaye Watkins’s debut novel “Gold Fame Citrus” over at Salon.
...moreThe Outdoor Co-ed Topless Pulp Fiction Appreciation Society is a New York-based book club founded five years ago. The club, with dozens of members, meet bare-chested in public places around the city. New York law allows women to be topless anywhere men can be, and the book club takes advantage of the fact to challenge […]
...moreWho are you?’ Isn’t this what every book asks of us as we chase its characters, trying to find out what they are reluctant to reveal? Is it not also the one essential thing we ask ourselves as human beings, as we struggle to make the choices that will define us? I can describe myself […]
...moreFeminists should accept and embrace Caitlyn and all trans and gender non-conforming people and see them wherever they define themselves on a broad gender spectrum. The project of ending misogyny and patriarchy is one that not only inextricably includes them, but should center around trans women, because the violence and rejection society throws at them […]
...moreIf Franzen is our genius realist, and DFW our genius postmodernist — how might they meld irony and sincerity? In an excerpt over at Salon from his new book, Keep It Fake: Inventing an Authentic Life, Eric G. Wilson talks irony, realism, postmodernism, David Foster Wallace, and Jonathan Franzen.
...more(n.); noxious exhalations from putrid organic matter; poisonous effluvia or germs polluting the atmosphere; a dangerous, foreboding, or deathlike influence or atmosphere “If the Internet is a bridge to the greater world, a troll is the beast who lives under it, extracting a toll in hurt feelings, outraged sensibilities and fear from all who pass.” […]
...morePEN America generated quite a controversy when it decided to honor French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo. Six authors called for a boycott of the gala and circulated a petition slamming the organization. Other authors, like Salman Rushdie, criticized the critics. Despite all the back-and-forth, the one perspective that seemed missing from the discussion was that […]
...moreWhether you’re singing, dancing, or making out with Spiderman, there’s something different about doing things in the rain. In an excerpt from her book Rain: A Cultural and National History published at Salon, Cynthia Barnett analyzes rain as a narrative device: Rain is such a compelling literary and cinematic trope that it’s easily and often […]
...moreIn an adapted excerpt from his book, All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner and the American West, over at Salon, David Gessner explains how Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey “can serve as guides” for the drought-suffering American West.
...moreThe system for determining worth and value strikes me as terribly strange, and it occurs to me that it just might require a suspension of disbelief. Luckily for me, I know something about that. For Salon, Rachel Basch writes about the humiliation of refinancing her mortgage as a writer, freelance editor, and adjunct.
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