Posts Tagged: susan sontag

How It Would Feel to Be Free: Olivia Laing’s Everybody

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Pleasures and possibilities, though, come hard-won in this book.

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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Maggie Nelson

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Maggie Nelson discusses her new book, ON FREEDOM: FOUR SONGS OF CARE AND CONSTRAINT.

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Fundamentally, Necessarily Vulnerable: A Conversation with jamie hood

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jamie hood discusses her debut book, HOW TO BE A GOOD GIRL.

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The Light Endures: 13th Balloon by Mark Bibbins

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Grief begs to be analogized, not to be tamed exactly, but somehow made approachable.

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What to Read When You or Someone You Love Has a Chronic Illness

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Molly Spencer shares a reading list to celebrate HINGE.

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Imposing the Life on the System: A Conversation with Eula Biss

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Eula Biss discusses her new book, HAVING AND BEING HAD.

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Rumpus Exclusive: “Brave Is a Decision”

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I’d crossed a line and owned a new secret life. There was no going back.

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Variants of Unknown Significance

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My gynecologist won’t stop bothering me about getting a genetic test done.

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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #212: Mark Bibbins

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“I had thought of the title as a placeholder, but it ended up hanging around.”

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The Genius and the Nobody: Lynne Tillman’s Men and Apparitions

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Make it new, the modernists said. But how to rebuild the living body?

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Reading Other People’s Mail: Talking with Michelle Dean

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Michelle Dean discusses Sharp: The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, literary legends, and the absence of Black writers from the narrative.

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Drawing Close to the Void: Talking with Patty Yumi Cottrell

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Patty Yumi Cottrell discusses her debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the Peace, how she accesses “the enraptured state” to write, and dreaming as an art form.

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Periphery: Exploring Bombs, Boundaries, and Family History

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Have you ever seen a feathery shadow at the edge of your eye? Was it a figure? Did it cross into your vision, like a hummingbird there and gone?

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There Is No Answer: Draw Your Weapons by Sarah Sentilles

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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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The Aura of Baby Einstein, the Child, the Toy

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If there is no distinction between show and commercial, ethics and entertainment, what kind of distinctions, if any, exists between her imaginary play, her consumer life, and our reality?

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You Can’t Be a Snob with Bad Teeth: Talking with David Sedaris

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David Sedaris discusses his new collection of diary entries, Theft By Finding, his love for book signings, and his inevitable return to IHOP.

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Oscars Flub as Grand Finale for Camp

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On the Hollywood stage—amidst gasps, jaw drops, and pearl clutches—we witnessed one final, beautifully coded failure and an over-the-top dethroning of the serious.

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On Suffering and Sympathy

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What is the distance between sympathy and action? How do we travel from one to the other?

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The Ordinary Extraordinary

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In an interview with Mark Greif for Los Angeles Review of Books, Greg Gerke frames Against Everything as an essay collection that faces outward, more political and less personal, despite its origins in rarified academia. Greif cites the influence and inspiration of traditions of thought exemplified by Susan Sontag and Stanley Cavell, the latter whose […]

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The Rumpus Interview with Brian Blanchfield

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Poet and writer Brian Blanchfield talks about his essay collection Proxies, touring in support of a prose collection versus a poetry collection, and frottage.

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Darryl Pinckney

The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Darryl Pinckney

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If your family or your people are looking over your shoulder, change your seat or push them away. Ask them to trust you with the truth.

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Sontag Syndrome

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Over at Hazlitt, Alana Massey walks us through the anxiety that so often accompanies reading great thinkers, laying bare her own insecurities at the altar of famed writer and critic, Susan Sontag. When she finally does sit down to read the writer she had so carefully side-stepped, her worst fears are confirmed, and she is […]

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Saving Our Minds

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At Brain Pickings, Maria Popova reviews Albert Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays, and suggests works by Nietzsche and Susan Sontag to read alongside Camus’s eye- and mind-opening work: If we are to save the mind we must ignore its gloomy virtues and celebrate its strength and wonder. Our world is poisoned by its misery, and seems to wallow […]

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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #10: Remember AIDS?

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AIDS isn’t over, but far too many think it is. Not everyone is haunted by remembering the dying, the friends gone gaunt, the lesions appearing, the artists dropping out of sight, the funerals, the lie-filled obituaries, the terrified waits for results of blood tests taken by nurses wearing masks and triple gloves.

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