Great Pain, Great Pleasure: Here All Night, Nightshade, and Blazons
All three remind readers that what is imagined is not always real and the world is not as expected.
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Posts Tagged: the new yorker
This Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #112: Roz Chast
” I think when you really love something, you notice the minutiae. It’s partly how you make something your own.”
...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.
...moreThis Week in Essays
A weekly roundup of essays we’re reading online!
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As Long as What Is Said Is Understood: Talking with Lesley Nneka Arimah
Lesley Nneka Arimah discusses her debut collection What It Means When a Man Falls from the Sky, mother-daughter relationships, and the pleasures of genre fiction.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, in a story by Akhil Sharma that will leave you devastated, an Indian woman in an arranged marriage wakes one day to discover that she loves her husband. “If You Sing Like That for Me,” originally published in the Atlantic in 1995, is available this week at Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading in conjunction with […]
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Language Is All Convention: Talking with Elif Batuman
Elif Batuman discusses her new novel The Idiot, what it means to be a writer, and the artifice of language.
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Ten Minutes of Motherhood: A Conversation with Ariel Levy
Ariel Levy on The Rules Do Not Apply, the illusion of control, and language’s inability to express grief.
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Ariel Levy’s Queer Generation
The playful sense of shifting identity applies to feminists, to writers, to anyone who chooses to believe we can reinvent ourselves.
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The Last Book I Loved: So Long, See You Tomorrow
By drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives.
...moreThis Week in Essays
At The California Sunday Magazine, Brooke Jarvis has a devastating piece about missing persons and family members lost over the border. For VIDA, Jean Ho shares her discouraging experience at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. And here at The Rumpus, Chellis Ying writes about rock climbing in China, which turned out to be an opportunity for both thrills […]
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Sound & Vision: Mark Alan Stamaty
Allyson McCabe talks with Mark Alan Stamaty, a Society of Illustrators four-time medalist, and the author-illustrator of ten books.
...moreWriting by Hand
There are those who bemoan schools’ decisions to stop teaching cursive, and those who welcome the decision with keyboard in hand. John Oppenheimer, writing for the New Yorker, talks about writing to his daughters at summer camp using cursive, even though they have some trouble deciphering the script and his body isn’t so fond of handwriting: […]
...moreTurn Signs into Comics
Cartoonist Julia Wertz needs your cool New York City signs. Per the New Yorker contributor’s Instagram: Hey New Yorkers! Send me photos or tips about cool signs around NYC so I can draw them for my book! Photos much appreciated but location data is good too. Juliajwertz at gmail In addition to her work documenting […]
...moreIn Sickness and Friendship and Jane Austen
Long before Curtis Sittenfeld was a New York Times bestselling author (Eligible), she was friends with Sam Park (This Burns My Heart). And they’re still friends: in an essay for the New Yorker, Sittenfeld chronicles their decades-long platonic romance, from early days collaborating on “50 Most Beautiful Sexiest Men Alive of the Year at Stanford” to dedicating their […]
...moreSteering Clear of “McMagic”
At the New Yorker, an elegant and comprehensive essay by Julie Phillips from a visit with Ursula Le Guin at her home in Portland, Oregon touches on the importance of place, both geographic and imaginative. Phillips writes, “[Le Guin] has always defended the fantastic, by which she means not formulaic fantasy or “McMagic” but the imagination […]
...moreReading in New York
At the New Yorker, Alexandra Schwartz writes about the New York Public Library’s newly renovated Rose Main Reading Room, which was closed for two and half years for restorations. “The room is one of the city’s great public spaces, a shared chamber devoted to private mental endeavors, and it’s looking good,” Schwartz says.
...morePorn is Complicated
There’s been a lot of thoughtful criticism on porn, written by women, recently—notably, Katrina Forrester in the New Yorker and Natasha Lennard in The Nation. For Granta, Andrea Stuart choses a unique angle in her own piece on porn, writing a genre-bending essay that can best be described as a reported piece of first-person criticism. After positioning herself in the feminist […]
...moreWhat Elena Ferrante and Kim Kardashian Have in Common
While the outing of Elena Ferrante and the robbing of Kim Kardashian were not inherently gendered acts, the responses to them certainly have been. In light of these two seemingly divergent issues, the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino meditates on the framing of female ambition in the media, and what happens “when women signify too much”: …the […]
...moreAll Bravado, Little Spirit
For the New Yorker, Vinson Cunningham writes that whatever your thoughts on the Nate Parker controversy, the new film The Birth Of A Nation is best left unseen: “Twelve Years” and, especially, “Django” promised to widen the expressive possibilities of the slave story—to add to the cultural meanings of the country’s gravest crime. Parker, though, works within […]
...moreEtger Keret on Racism and Parenting
In a primal sense, racism involves favoring the people who are closest to you genetically. It is funny how most liberal left-wingers (well, me, at least) would never think of not hiring someone because he was of a different race or religion, but, at the same time, would try to get their child a bigger […]
...moreLooking Back at Albee
For the New Yorker, Hilton Als reaches across Edward Albee’s long career to take the pulse of the themes and concerns of the late, great playwright. Memory, attachment, cruelty, and Albee’s sense of himself as an outsider all informed the dramas. Als writes, “Part of Albee’s genius was figuring out ways to bring his brilliant gay talk […]
...more“The Disjointedness of Life”
For the New Yorker, Peter Moskowitz talks to poet Tommy Pico about anger, juxtaposition, and inheritance: He told me that he uses poetry to square two identities that don’t fit together well: being a poor, queer kid from the rez, and being a pleasure-seeking, technology-addicted New Yorker who would rather chase the boys he meets on […]
...moreRiding the Underground
The Underground Railroad has always fascinated Americans, and recently it has exploded in popularity, with books, TV shows, and even representation on United States currency. But does the mythologized version of the Underground Railroad live up to actual history? In a recent New Yorker article, Kathryn Schulz examines recent media incarnations of the Railroad: But, as more recent […]
...more“The Way We Thought We Would Be Interested”
For the New Yorker, James Wood praises Joy Williams’s oblique precision: In Williams’s world, we are all wandering interlopers—adrift, trapped, groundless—looking for visitors’ privileges.
...moreLearning and Loving in French
Supposedly, the best way to master a foreign language is to fall in love with a native speaker. Language, in delineating a boundary that can be transgressed, is full of romantic potential. … If first languages are reservoirs of emotion, second languages can be rivers undammed, freeing their speakers to ride different currents. Over at […]
...moreWealth and the American Dream
Two recent novels, The Nest by Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney and Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty by Ramona Ausubel, explore privilege and entitlement, and what happens when wealth disappears. It can be hard to feel sorry for trust fund kids when you live paycheck to paycheck, but: From some distance, it’s a parable about the […]
...moreDon’t Forget the Bunting
If Basil Bunting were not remembered for “Briggflatts”—his longest and best poem, first published fifty years ago—he might still be remembered as the protagonist of a preposterously eventful twentieth-century life. Poet Basil Bunting had an unconventional life full of interesting journeys and experiences. Just perfect for a poet.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
Irish author Danielle McLaughlin didn’t start writing fiction until 2010, but in the years since she has amassed an impressive collection of writing awards, including the William Trevor/Elizabeth Bowen International Short Story Competition, and has twice placed stories in the New Yorker. Last year, her debut short story collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets was published across the pond […]
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