Trudging Down Death Road
Reveal yourself. Reveal yourself. You cannot be dead. Reveal yourself.
...moreReveal yourself. Reveal yourself. You cannot be dead. Reveal yourself.
...moreRachel Lyon discusses her debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, artistic communities, the quotidian nature of the supernatural, and hyper-gentrification.
...morePatrick Madden teaches writing at Brigham Young University and is the author of the essay collection Quotidiana. His essays frequently appear in literary magazines and have been featured in The Best Creative Nonfiction and The Best American Spiritual Writing anthologies. He pays close attention to the details of the every day, infusing humor and self-deprecation, combining […]
...moreBy drawing us into his childhood, Maxwell shows us how to revisit our own. We become the storytellers of our own lives.
...moreVi Khi Nao on her new novel Fish in Exile, why women shouldn’t apologize (even when they’re wrong), moving between genres, and why humor is vital in a novel full of darkness and grief.
...more“We didn’t ask for it,” Cave begins another poetic flight, and again we think he’s talking about something ghastly, “but it’s all around us, a gratuitous beauty.”
...moreTo memorialize a tragedy, one must inscribe unmistakable significance into reticent materials, attempting to curb the natural processes of forgetting and obsolescence. For The Nation, Becca Rothfeld writes about W.G. Sebald, author of The Emigrants, among others, and his obsession with artistic expression as the aestheticization of truth, almost necessarily a “mangling,” when the goal is […]
...more[Noyes’s] stories are nuanced and unapologetic, revealing the shadow sides of women and girls in all their wild and terrible glory.
...moreShould Facebook decide what qualifies as tragedy? How can technology shape stories beyond how they are displayed? Herzog on reality. Would our Founding Fathers approve of copyright law?
...moreRumpus Interviews Editor Ben Pfeiffer discusses the complete loss of hope in Anton Chekhov’s literary works, in relation to modern TV shows such as The Leftovers and The Walking Dead. Pfeiffer wonders why people have continued to, watch, read, and create these dark, despairing works when we already live in a world of tragedy: …a […]
...more99 Homes continues Bahrani’s tendency to take on big topics, to cut them into chewable pieces for its audience
...moreAuthor Christopher Bollen talks about his sophomore novel, Orient, secrets and privacy, sexual orientation in fiction, and the lost art of the whodunit mystery.
...moreAuthor Neil Smith discusses his latest book, Boo, the suffering inherent in being thirteen years old, and how friendship can help pull us through traumatic events in our lives.
...moreAs I worked, filing reports every night from a hotel room, the details nagged at me. Her mother, Japa Tamang, was living in an open-sided shed once used to store grain, in hills still shuddering from aftershocks. My husband had the idea of giving her a ride back to Kathmandu and a plane ticket to […]
...moreWho do we remember and why do we mourn? Teju Cole writes about unmournable bodies for the New Yorker.
...moreA standout record in Mark Kozelek’s long career is the critically-lauded 2014 release, Benji. The presence of everyday tragedies permeates the record and propels the keening voice of Kozelek, aka Sun Kil Moon. On “Micheline,” he offers us three stories whose sad endings are complicated by a rich, guitar-driven melody in a major key. In […]
...moreFor months, I had worked to help students make connections between sports and society, to help them analyze and interrogate media representations of sport and of athletes….In the immediate aftermath of the Boston bombings, I had no answers and very little context.
...moreCheck out these tasty Rumpus morsels, posted over the weekend! Wendy Ortiz interviews poet Louise Mathias about beauty, ecstasy, and eroticism…and “snakes and horses and sky and birds and hallucinogenic flowers, and stars, and the smell of creosote after rain, and…” When journalist Maggie Downs lost a friend in a skydiving accident, many of her […]
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