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people do not fight their battles in isolation between mountains of seawater or in a vacuum of hypermasculine idealism; they suffer together and sometimes apart with a thin connective tissue strung between them.
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I laugh. My laugh, this thing that sounds better on somebody else.
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I’ve been explaining the Armenian Genocide all my life.
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How does a fictional account come to stand in for history?
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Indie bookstore news from across the country and around the world!
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Preti Taneja interviews her mentor, Maureen Freely.
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Always, when my father spoke to me in words I could not understand, my guilt spoke back.
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When I was young, my grandma told me that Armenians are distant descendants of Noah.
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Lydia Kiesling discusses her debut novel, THE GOLDEN STATE.
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“All art is somehow a kind of witness, whether to beauty or to anything else.”
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Devorah Blachor discusses The Feminist’s Guide to Raising a Little Princess, princess culture in America and abroad, and publishing a book on feminism in the current political climate.
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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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Elif Batuman discusses her new novel The Idiot, what it means to be a writer, and the artifice of language.
...moreBefore 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. […]
...moreBooks Are Magic opens in Brooklyn, making Emma Straub the latest author to open a bookstore. Turkish police arrested seven teachers at a bookstore in a raid against dissent. A Houston bookstore celebrated indie bookstore day with drunk coloring.
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But still: A pattern. The trauma had been diluted by time. But, it was still present, still discernible, in my blood.
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It is true that I’m talking to a photo, but I’m not crazy. Neither am I a durochka. Fools are oblivious, at least those from my childhood fairy tales. I, on the other hand, am perfectly aware of the problem.
...moreAlthough Brooklyn stalwart BookCourt is sadly set to close at the end of the year, Modern Lovers author and former BookCourt employee Emma Straub plans to open a new shop in the the neighborhood. Books Are Magic, as the shop will be called, will be 1,500 square feet and hopes to open by April. Straub wouldn’t be […]
...moreFirst, in Rumpus Saturday Fiction, Sherman Alexie’s shares three short stories—”Fixed Income,” “Honor Society,” and “Valediction”—that all offer his trademark whimsy and insight into the human condition. Three different teenagers struggle with poverty, endemic racism, and social exclusion, and must depend upon themselves to make the right choices in difficult moral situations. Then, in the […]
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“You can’t hold on to the past,” Elif once told me. “You don’t know how. You don’t know what to keep, what to throw away. So you keep it all. And you can’t do that. No one can.”
...moreThis week, the Turkish government has jailed a prominent politician who is referred to fondly as “Kurdish Obama” and shutdown Cumhuriyet, a popular newspaper. Amid these distressing developments, Kaya Genç looks towards books and history in her profile of 20th century Turkish humorist Aziz Nesin at The Millions. Nesin, who Genç compares to Christopher Hitchens and […]
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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 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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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.
...moreBrooklyn-based photographer Ebru Yildiz talks with Allyson McCabe about shooting concert photos, moving to New York from Turkey, and discovering the city’s music scene.
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Miroslav Penkov discusses his debut novel, Stork Mountain, Balkan history, and the difficulties and rewards of being a bilingual writer.
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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.
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