A Gripping, Limited Call to Arms: Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments
There are so many happy endings that dystopia and utopia become almost indistinguishable by the novel’s end.
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Posts Tagged: Utopia
A Complicated, Shifting Subjectivity: Talking with Franny Choi
Franny Choi discusses her second collection, SOFT SCIENCE.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Sarah Blake
Sarah Blake discusses her new collection, Let’s Not Live on Earth, questions in poems, monsters, and the challenge of writing a dystopia.
...moreAlbum of the Week: Björk’s Utopia
“i feel in this time of trump it is a necessity to have a plan, a manifesto, an alternative.”
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Fidel Castro: The Playboy Comandante
The comandante produced ideological fantasies on a mass scale within the context of the Cold War which led to an exotic, sexy, and happy vision of Cuba.
...moreMany Roads to Worship
Erik Reece, author of Utopia Drive: A Road Trip Through America’s Most Radical Idea, writes a lively review of Thomas More’s 1516 novel, Utopia, for FSG’s Work in Progress. More’s Utopians “revere religious tolerance above all else…in keeping with the sentiments of their founder, Utopos, who ‘considered it possible that God made different people believe […]
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The Commune
Our house, we believed, was a microcosm of that country. Every month, we’d gather at the kitchen table for our house meeting, where we, like politicians, unveiled our big plans for change.
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The Rumpus Interview with Chris Jennings
Chris Jennings talks about his new book Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism, incremental reform, Transcendentalists, Shakers, and creating a more perfect future.
...moreWhat Doesn’t Yet Exist
At the Guardian, Terry Eagleton writes about revolutions, the future, and utopias: The real soothsayers are those hired by the big corporations to peer into the entrails of the system and assure their masters that their profits are safe for another 30 years. We live in a world that seeks to extend its sovereignty even […]
...moreDan Weiss’s Morning Coffee
(Dan Weiss is out on tour with his band The Yellow Dress. He’ll be back on August 3rd.) Getting your MFA at 68. Utopias have nothing but trouble. Fetishizing food. Is Gawker good?
...morePeak Dystopia
Adam Sternbergh, author of Dystopian novel Shovel Ready, asked whether readers are burning out on the Dystopian novel. He goes as far as suggesting that perhaps the next great novel will be a Utopian one. Emily Temple, writing at Flavorwire, explains why Utopias don’t make good novel settings: The reason that utopian novels are far […]
...moreWeekly Geekery
Examining the troubled origins of our search for technological utopia. Autocorrect is our favorite fall guy for texting errors, but it’s also the reason you can text. What is worth saving from your digital legacy? Don’t resist, just welcome our robot overlords. Accessing the Internet’s inner thoughts.
...moreParadise Locked
In anticipation of this past week’s Hay Festival, fiction luminary Toni Morrison wrote an essay for The Telegraph examining the concept of paradise as it relates to race and class. The novelist locates the promise of this “Utopia for few” in both early black newspapers and the pursuit-of-happiness ethos that drives contemporary American life: unattainable […]
...moreMaddAddam Is Coming
If you, like us, are drooling in anticipation for the conclusion to literary empress (and Rumpus interviewee!) Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, well, mop up your chin and then check out this mini-profile of Atwood and her most recent speculative-fiction series. A short video interview with her includes some incisive comments about dystopias and utopias being […]
...moreThe Ancient Art of the Book Blurb
Book blurbs—and the controversies surrounding them—go back as far as Thomas More, who gathered a bouquet of them for Utopia. Ben Jonson blurbed Shakespeare. Ralph Waldo Emerson blurbed Walt Whitman. But do they really mean anything anymore? Click through to find out—and read historical blurbs and blurb satires like this one: Say! Ain’t this book a […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Lauren Groff
Anyone who knows Lauren Groff’s fiction would not be surprised to find that as a child in upstate New York her favorite stories were Brothers Grimm fairy tales, and by her teens she was determined to be a writer. After completing her MFA at University of Wisconsin-Madison, she worked odd jobs that allowed her hours […]
...moreThe Utopian Project
“In relation to the future, a poem is like a note sealed in a bottle and thrown into the sea.” Charles Simic writes on Poetry and Utopia for the New York Review of Books.
...moreHow To Give a [email protected]#
Some days everything goes wrong. Like today, when I called the NYTBR the NYTRB on Twitter, or when I linked to the wrong thing on the book blog roundup, or when I almost ran over a San Francisco marathon runner with my bike and then accidentally blocked the photographer from taking a picture that the […]
...moreUtopia, What Are You Good For?
“But the question lingers: Apart from its questionable value as a marketing strategy, what is utopia good for?” Paul La Farge at Bookforum on the concept and uses of utopia, with special mention of San Francisco and Burning Man.
...moreThe Pinup Promised-Land
Still warm in her grave, Bettie Page’s mid-century pinup appeal is unlikely to cool off anytime soon. Artist Lauren Bergman puts pinups like Bettie on a pedestal,
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