Posts Tagged: the new york times

The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Gira Grant

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Melissa Gira Grant talks sex workers’ rights, labor politics, the novelty of women’s sexuality, and her book, Playing the Whore: The Work of Sex Work.

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Sacred Literature

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For the New York Times, Alexandra Alter interviews Salman Rushdie about his new novel Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. Their discussion covers the stylistic choices that went into the novel, as well as the role of mythology and polytheistic religions in Rushdie’s larger body of work: Ideas are interesting to me, and religions are a […]

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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Informing Form

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She was a physical, as opposed to a media, reality to me—someone with a voice to be addressed rather than a flattened image.

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The Volcano that Defined the 1816-7 Art Scene

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“The year without a summer,” as 1816 came to be known, gave birth not only to paintings of fiery sunsets and tempestuous skies but two genres of gothic fiction. The freakish progeny were Frankenstein and the human vampire, which have loomed large in art and literature ever since. William J. Broad writes for the New […]

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The Rumpus Interview with Joshua Mohr and Janis Cooke Newman

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Authors Joshua Mohr and Janis Cooke Newman talk with one another about their new novels, All This Life and A Master Plan for Rescue, respectively.

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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Stepfatherhood

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“He was my real dad,” she says. “I just happened to have two.”

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Literary Tripping

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All of which adds up to a place that produces writers the way France produces cheese — prodigiously, and with world-class excellence — a place that calls on its writers’ talent and inspiration and, in turn, is reflected back into the world through their words. And though the list of Louisiana writers — both homegrown […]

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Mirrors and Windows

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Jacqueline Woodson responds to Daniel Handler’s racist watermelon joke at the National Book Awards with a moving and direct piece in the New York Times. She neither condemns nor forgives Handler, but instead focuses on her personal history with the watermelon joke, the positive direction of diversity in publishing, and her mission in writing: This […]

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The Lost Pulp of Gore Vidal

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Before he became an acclaimed novelist and political commentator, Gore Vidal was just a guy trying to make ends meet. Under three different pseudonyms, Vidal wrote a romance novel, three mysteries, and a crime thriller. Now, over 50 years later,  Thieves Fall Out, a pulp novel set during the 1952 Egyptian Revolution, is being re-issued, […]

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Text-ing

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Interactive digital storytelling: fiction’s next frontier? In the New York Times, Chris Suellentrop examines interactive technologies as used in Blood & Laurels, by Emily Short: Exploring those possibilities is one reason Ms. Short became a writer of interactive fiction rather than of more conventional stories. “I found myself frustrated that I couldn’t write multiple versions of the same scene,” she […]

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Learning from Books that Are Supposedly Terrible

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As any lover of literature might tell you, all books are not created equal. But this does not mean that there is nothing to be gained from novels that are, in many ways, flawed. Over at the New York Times, writers Leslie Jamison and James Parker discuss “supposedly terrible books that left a lasting impression”: I will always love Go Ask […]

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From True Love to Ambivalence

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Think your love of certain passages will never fade? The New York Times Sunday Book Review argues that perhaps not all passages will withstand the test of time. How much does age change what we love? If you’re the sort of person who has always marked up your books — written comments in the margins and […]

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Absent Characters

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People of color have been largely excluded from children’s literature. Of the 3,200 children’s books published in 2013, only 93 featured black characters. In his essay, “The Apartheid of Children’s Literature,” Christopher Myers speaks out against the trend of allowing members of certain racial groups to go unseen because of the color of their skin. […]

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The Academic Writing Debate

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At the end of last month, Nicholas Kristof published a piece in the New York Times calling for academics to come out from their insular bubble and participate in the mainstream conversation—especially with respect to writing. Joshua Rothman responded in the New Yorker that academic writing is only as “knotty and strange, remote and insular, technical and specialized, forbidding and clannish” […]

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Mark Twain Still Popular…In China!

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Did you know that Mark Twain is one of the best known foreign writers in China? Neither did we. There is a well earned, and unabashed image of Mark Twain as the quintessential American author and for good reason. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remains in the American cannon and is taught all over the […]

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“Pop,” “Soda,” or “Heaven Bubbles”?

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You’ve probably seen this regional-dialect quiz from the New York Times making the rounds on your social networks. You answer questions about your vocabulary and pronunciation, and it tries to determine where in the United States you’re from. But the New Yorker‘s Shouts & Murmurs blog is really upping the ante with their own dialect quiz, which […]

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Growing Up Homeless In NYC

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Andrea Elliott’s five-part New York Times essay “Invisible Child” is a brutal but absolutely necessary read. In it, Elliott follows Dasani, a bright, athletic girl who, along with her parents and seven siblings, struggle through daily life in savagely underfunded homeless shelters and public schools. It’s a reminder of how strong you have to be to […]

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Cabbie Poetry

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“Tip the waitress or barman well, ‘cause you’re going to need their toilet.” Taxi drivers made strides this year at the PEN World Voices Festival. For a handful of weeks, a group of long-standing New York City taxi drivers have been meeting to poetically reflect on their adventures shuttling passengers throughout the boroughs. Under the […]

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