What Society Allows Us to Be: Megha Majumdar’s A Burning
What does it mean to be free?
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Posts Tagged: Terrorism
Between Sex and Death: Deborah Landau’s Soft Targets
Survival, for Landau, is both instinctual and ultimately pointless.
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Terror Is a Faggot with Halal Sausages Strapped to His Chest
Dishonesty became a form of protection.
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We’re All Unreliable Narrators: Talking with R.O. Kwon
R.O. Kwon discusses her debut novel, THE INCENDIARIES.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Shara Lessley
Shara Lessley discusses her new collection, The Explosive Expert’s Wife, the task of humanizing those we might dismiss as monsters, and writing toward hope.
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Cowboy or Terrorist? Harney County and the Trump Presidency
One person’s freedom to do anything they want can mean the absolute negation of another’s freedom.
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Nothing Foreign about It: Talking with Omar El Akkad
Omar El Akkad discusses his debut novel American War, suicide terrorism, fossil fuels, and blankets.
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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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TORCH: My American Playground
I left the car by the roadside and ran up the slope, in tears now, reaching the picnic tables and swings and, as bright and vivid as in my dreams, my purple-shaped climbing frame, exactly as I remembered it.
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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 […]
...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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We Brown Women
Our bodies will not be your banners. We are not yours to use and abuse, we are not yours to dupe. We see through your words, and we see your violence.
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The Rumpus Interview with Imbolo Mbue
Imbolo Mbue discusses her debut novel Behold the Dreamers, teaching herself how to write a novel, and the price of the American Dream.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #60: Leah Kaminsky
Leah Kaminsky’s debut novel, The Waiting Room, depicts one fateful day in the life of an Australian doctor and mother, Dina, living in Haifa, Israel. Dina is trying to maintain normalcy as she goes about her work as a family doctor, cares for her son, and fights to preserve her faltering relationship with her husband, […]
...moreDear President-elect Trump
This evening, after returning home from my job as an English instructor in St. Paul, Minnesota, I locked my keys in my car. I believe the reason for this mistake pertained to my haggard and undone emotions. From my vantage point, your campaign included numerous emotional-appeal techniques. Over the last year, I’ve heard a lot of […]
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United We Stand
No one knows exactly what the next four years will bring. But we are always stronger when we protest together.
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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; […]
...moreBand Names for Books
Spoiler alert: there are no cannibals in Mike Roberts’s new post-9/11 novel Cannibals in Love, but there’s a lot to admire. Over at FSG Originals, Will Chancellor gets granular in conversation with Roberts on the episodic nature of memory, and the ways that terrorism forces a very physical response in its victims, at the same time “trigger[ing] […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
A state run bookstore in Shanghai is ripping out pages from Webster’s Dictionary that include a reference to Taiwan. The Dallas Morning News checks in with Deep Vellum Books, the bookstore offshoot of Deep Vellum Publishing that owner Will Evans sought a business partner to keep going. Local news in Madison, Connecticut goes inside twenty-six-year-old […]
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Bodies in Space: Teaching after Trauma
Turning onto my street and looking south I feel the ground drop beneath me every time—I turn the corner and the sidewalk falls. I feel invisible then, as if I’ve vaporized.
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R.I.P.: Naiveté
Nearly a decade ago, on what was then my first and only day in Paris, I saw a dead person for the first time.
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The Rumpus Interview with John Reed
John Reed discusses Snowball’s Chance, his parody of Animal Farm, and the lawsuits, debates, and discoveries that followed the book’s publication.
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American Ambiguity
My racial awareness, perhaps even my awareness of myself as a person, self-consciousness, is a three-pronged paradox of shame, pride, and indifference.
...moreWeekly Geekery
Should you really follow your bliss? What is really behind Flint’s water crisis? Will Facebook become even more of a virtual reality? Novelists are the best at seeing inside the mind of a terrorist.
...moreThe Enduring Ordinariness of Parisian Life
We’re defiant, but shaky. We can’t get over what we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, who we’ve lost, and we don’t really want to. But we’ll eventually get used to the fact that it happened. It will become part of our daily lives. Over at Lit Hub, Lauren Elkin reflects on the writer George Perec and […]
...moreFighting Terrorism Through Language
The terrorist organization that coordinated attacks in Paris last week has alternately been called ISIS, ISIL, and IS by government and media. However, when French President Francois Hollande addressed the world, he referred to the organization as Daesh for a very good reason: language. In addition to being a transliteration of the group’s Arabic acronym meaning […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Shakespeare & Co. sheltered twenty people during the terror attacks in Paris last week. New York City’s Shakespeare & Co., unrelated to the Parisian store, has some expansion plans. The shop and name was bought by Dane Neller, the CEO of On Demand Books, a company that makes the Espresso Book Machine. He envisions a […]
...moreParis Forever
That’s not to say being informed isn’t important—of course it is—but I suddenly felt a more important calling. I remembered the words of Marlon Brando in the wake of 9/11: “This is exactly the time for poetry!” Over at Lit Hub, Tyler Malone writes about the recent tragic events in Paris and finding some relief […]
...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 […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Deborah Reed
Author Deborah Reed discusses her latest novel, Olivay, the necessity of fire, Los Angeles anxiety, and how she found fulfillment at the edge of the American West.
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