The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #128: Dunya Mikhail
“All art is somehow a kind of witness, whether to beauty or to anything else.”
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Posts Tagged: Turkey
Beneath a Pile of Tulle and Tiaras: Talking with Devorah Blachor
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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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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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.
...moreAlbum of the Week: To Syria, With Love by Omar Souleyman
Before 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. […]
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Books 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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TORCH: Blood Trauma
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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On Making Wishes
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.
...moreThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Although 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 […]
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, 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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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Never Let Me Go
“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.”
...moreAziz Nesin’s Ghost
This 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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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; […]
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Michael Helm
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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Leaving Aleppo: Crossing Syria’s Most Dangerous Checkpoints
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.
...moreSound & Vision: Ebru Yildiz
Brooklyn-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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The Rumpus Interview with Miroslav Penkov
Miroslav Penkov discusses his debut novel, Stork Mountain, Balkan history, and the difficulties and rewards of being a bilingual writer.
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The Rumpus Interview with Meline Toumani
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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You’re Such a Gollum
A man is facing two years in prison after comparing Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to the Lord of the Rings character, Gollum. However, the judge in the case isn’t sure that the comparison is really an insult: The judge adjourned the case to February and despatched…two academics, two behavioural scientists or psychologists and an expert […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Stars Hollow, Revisited
They always find their way back to one another again.
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Paper Trumpets #13: Land of Plenty
Most turkeys, even uncooked ones, cannot fly very well. This must be a magical floating turkey.
...moreTwitter, Unplugged
Writing from Turkey, a country that temporarily unplugged Twitter to quell government protests, novelist and essayist Kaya Genç describes the experience of disconnecting from the service. Instead of the liberation he expected, the lack of Twitter left him feeling like a prisoner in solitary confinement: On my third day without Twitter, however, I realized that I […]
...moreTurkish Poem Takes On Prophetic Tone
My leaves are my eyes, I look in amazement I watch you with one hundred thousand eyes, I watch Istanbul Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet Ran wrote those words about a tree in Gulhane Park, but after the recent protests in Istanbul, they seem to apply equally well to Gezi Park. At the PEN Atlas, Kaya Genç has […]
...moreMore On Turkey
Here are a couple more resources for anyone looking to get a better handle on the situation in Turkey right now. Gawker has a simple, accessible FAQ-style explanation for those of us who don’t know much about Turkish politics. Boing Boing linked to an interesting interview with a protester at a German website. Leave more […]
...moreTurkish Protest News
Though American media coverage has been minimal, anti-government protests in Turkey have been raging for three days now. The BBC has a summary of the protesters’ grievances against Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the country’s increasingly autocratic and religious prime minister. The Guardian is maintaining an often-updated live feed on the situation.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Vendela Vida
“With every book you write you limit yourself a little bit because you can’t do the same thing again. I’ve written two novels about people in their 20s—with this one I wanted to write about a woman looking back on her life.”
...moreThe Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
I was out last week on vacation, but I’m back. And there’s a lot to catch up on. Here goes … In Turkey, you can go to jail for using the letters Q, W and X. (via) Even Bill and Ted might have gone to this library. The anthology Love is a Four Letter Word […]
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