The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #128: Dunya Mikhail
“All art is somehow a kind of witness, whether to beauty or to anything else.”
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Posts Tagged: syria
After the Telling
We want to protect our children from everything, even sometimes ourselves.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good
The sounds that she would expect here are entirely absent. There are no cries, no weeping. Just soothing, muffled tones.
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Death, Satan, and Cats: A Conversation with Rabih Alameddine
Rabih Alameddine discusses his newest novel, The Angel of History, surviving the AIDS epidemic, and the role of religion in his life and writing.
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TORCH: An Alien, Ineligible for Participation
That a bumbling demagogue would be able to take this institutional racism and weaponize it is, then, not really a surprise. The seeds for this hate were planted a long time ago.
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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.
...moreAlbum of the Week: To Syria, With Love by Omar Souleyman
Before becoming one of the most praised electronic music producers of the last few years, Omar Souleyman was a successful wedding singer in his homeland Syria, with something like five hundred live albums released through 2011, the year the civil war broke in his country, forcing him to flee to Turkey, where he’s been based ever since. […]
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What to Read When the President Decides It’s “Time to Exit Paris”
Turn off the television and pick up a book. You’ll feel better for it, we promise.
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All Writing Is Political: A Conversation with Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid discusses his new novel, Exit West, hope in fiction as a form of resistance, the necessity of learning to accept social change, and how much America and Pakistan have come to resemble each other.
...moreThis Week in Trumplandia
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 […]
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What to Read When Things Go Nuclear
Here are some books to read that will remind you that there is beauty out there, even if it’s hard-wrought.
...moreThis Week in Essays
Through her work with Doctors Without Borders, Caitlin L. Chandler offers us a glimpse of what life is like on the Syrian border for Guernica. For Real Life magazine, Christopher Schaberg examines the symbolism of airports as “fraught borderlands” perfect for a protest. Here at The Rumpus, Katharine Coldiron takes our minds for a spin around the concepts of […]
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #16: The Game Is On
Today is the day that Pr*sident Trump shut down the American borders to refugees, green card holders, and non-citizens with paid for and improved visas—if they were from certain “Muslim majority” countries… It is also the day his administration made it clear that, going forward, “Christian” refugees would be given priority over all other refugees—and […]
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #13: Such Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
Do you keep a dream journal? I started as a teenager, and continue on-and-off. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between a dream and a memory. Does this happen to you? Or am I confessing to something strange and pathological? Where is the line between pathology and creativity?
...more“A Star That Peers Through Your Window”
German children’s book author Thomas Mac Pfeifer spent over a year interviewing children who had migrated to Germany from war-stricken countries such as Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan with the purpose of hearing and collecting their favorite bedtime stories into one book, Ein Stern, der in dein Fenster schaut (“A star that peers through your window”). […]
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Fresh Comics #12: Rolling Blackouts
Some books take such a mammoth effort to produce that it’s hard to want to be critical of them. Rolling Blackouts is one of those books. The nearly 300 pages of delicately crafted, watercolored panels make evident that Sarah Glidden is a workhorse of a talent. The dialogue—which is mostly transcribed from conversations—is incredibly natural and nuanced; […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Saleem Haddad
Saleem Haddad discusses his debut novel Guapa, the Orlando shootings, the importance of queer spaces, and Arab literature.
...moreTranslating the War in Syria
At Lit Hub, Lina Mounzer discusses the Syrian women bearing witness to the war through writing, her own complicated relationship with the English language, and translation as a symbolic act: [War] reshapes your vocabulary. It becomes part of your language. A barrel will no longer ever be a barrel again; shrapnel will always explode from […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Michael Helm
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Michael Helm about his new novel After James, the line between paranoia and caution, and the use of poetry as a plot device.
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Leaving Aleppo: Crossing Syria’s Most Dangerous Checkpoints
After four years of ceaseless bombing and brutality, the security of life itself has been reduced in Aleppo to horror, terror, and scarcity of basic human resources.
...moreUnderstanding Palmyra
Why do we care so much about these ruins, while paying so little attention to the more recent past or present of Syria? Perhaps because we can assimilate these classical remains to our own past. At Hyperallergic, Michael Press explores the Anglophone world’s relationship with the ancient city of Palmyra in present-day Syria, providing a […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Chris Jennings
Chris Jennings talks about his new book Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, incremental reform, Transcendentalists, Shakers, and creating a more perfect future.
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The Rumpus Interview with Meline Toumani
Meline Toumani discusses her debut, There Was and There Was Not, the rewards and risks of writing a political memoir, and what it means to approach a divided past and future.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Bookstores in Mumbai, India are losing customers from institutional sales as large buyers turn directly to suppliers, and though 700 existing retailers exist in the city, the last few years have no seen new stores open. A Syrian couple has opened an Arabic-language bookstore in Istanbul hoping to change cultural perceptions. The Occidental Weekly offers […]
...moreOn Refugees, and Refusing to Be Scared
The news that governors are suddenly deciding that they don’t want to welcome Syrian refugees has really driven home to me just how cowardly much of this country is. We talk tough, mind you, but when we’re asked to really open ourselves up to something, we refuse. I’m not talking about the country’s willingness to […]
...moreOmar Souleymon Pledges to Help Syrian Refugees
The Syrian-born musician has issued a statement committing himself to helping those fleeing the current crisis in the country, dedicating all of his shows in the immediate future to the cause of the refugees’ safe travels: Began in March 2013 at SXSW with a little help from many friends, all future Omar Souleyman shows dedicate […]
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This Is a Refugee Camp
Zoe and I got an email the other day from Stephen Dau, a writer and expat who’s been living in Belgium the last ten years or so. He wanted to draw our attention to his current project, a series of reports from the refugee camp that has sprung up, seemingly overnight, in a park in […]
...moreSyrian Refugees Napkin Math
Cost of the rubber raft meant to transport the Kurdi family from Turkey to Greece = $4450 Number of Kurdi family members to survive trip = 1 Age of Aylan Kurdi, the youngest family member drowned at sea = 3 years Age of his drowned brother, Ghalib = 5 years Syrian refugees drowned or missing at sea seeking safer […]
...moreHow “Good Stories” Make Sense of Crisis
For the Guardian, author Gillian Cross explains how fiction might help people to better understand and empathize with the experience of Syrian refugees: It might seem frivolous to be talking about stories at a time like this. Shouldn’t we be concentrating on the real world? Isn’t fiction soft and sentimental compared with the terrible news we […]
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