Child as Mother to the Woman: Catherine Gammon’s China Blue
In this book we are taken by all three: language, plot, character.
...more
Posts Tagged: Vietnam War
Both Trauma and Sin: Elizabeth Miki Brina’s Speak, Okinawa
Speak, Okinawa is masterful at describing the internal dissonance that mixed race children can feel.
...more
Investigative but Intimate: A Conversation with Robert L. Shuster
Robert L. Shuster discusses his debut novel, TO ZENZI.
...more
Loving Something That May Destroy Us: A Conversation with Angie Cruz
Angie Cruz discusses her newest novel, DOMINICANA.
...more
Beginning Again: Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
For Little Dog, putting language to memory becomes a way to survive.
...more
Constellations of Identity: A Conversation with J. Michael Martinez
J. Michael Martinez discusses his third collection of poetry, MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAS.
...more
An Important Book: Inheriting the War edited by Laren McClung
There is no escape from the cradle of this shame.
...more
Beautiful Evil: The Great Alone by Kristin Hannah
Alaska attracts those looking to be free from the constraints of society.
...more
The Abattoir
This is what my mother doesn’t want me to see: the death rattle in a forbidden room. This is what she doesn’t want me to know: how one life is sacrificed for another to live.
...more
Reading Ferlinghetti in the Age of Trump
This lesson feels especially relevant to our moment: that it’s possible to be both a frustrated activist and also a present and joyful human being.
...more
Sound & Vision: Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw
Allyson McCabe talks with Lois Weaver and Peggy Shaw, two of the founders of the performance group Split Britches, about their lives and work.
...more
A Specific Kind of Loneliness: In Conversation with Geeta Kothari
Geeta Kothari discusses her debut collection, American xenophobia, and the immigrant narrative.
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #86: Max Allan Collins
In April, the Mystery Writers of America named Max Allan Collins a Grand Master, the organization’s peer-voted lifetime achievement award. Collins has had a prolific and often eclectic career. The Iowa Writers Workshop graduate has written more than one hundred books, has had a long career as a comics writer including, most famously, the Road to […]
...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 13): “Letter to Simic from Boulder”
“Wherever you are on earth, you are safe,” writes Richard Hugo. Really?
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Than Nguyen discusses his story collection The Refugees, growing up in a Vietnamese community in San Jose in the 1980s, and the power of secondhand memories.
...more
The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #15: Contemplation + Politics
Thomas Merton, the most prominent Catholic monk of the 20th century, famously left the world to live a cloistered life at the Cistercian Abbey of Gethsemini in rural Kentucky, taking vows and becoming Father Louis. As many will recall, he described his journey to the cloister in one of the century’s masterpieces of memoir, The […]
...more
The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #68: David Kukoff
“To read,” wrote E.M. Cioran, “is to let someone else do the work for you.” Indeed, David Kukoff has done extensive footwork collecting an array of varied experiences to give us an idea of what it was to live in LA during what might arguably be one of its most pivotal decades. His new anthology, […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Great Elk
For a moment, seeing the small figures walking before the elk makes me think that white people know the Great Elk too.
...more
David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 7): “Facing It”
There should be no forgetting, much less forgiveness, of what happened during the Vietnam War.
...more
Wanted/Needed/Loved: Thao Nguyen’s Release
The thing I want to talk about is something I’m not in possession of anymore, but of all the things I’ve lost it’s the thing I think about the most.
...moreSong of the Day: “Luv N’ Haight”
Sly and the Family Stone’s anarchic album There’s a Riot Goin’ On, released in 1971 following several tumultuous years in America, has been called “blunt and unflinching” and “very much informed by drugs” and “paranoia.” While the funk group’s creative dynamo, Sly Stone, had indeed been sidelined by drug abuse for months, his disillusionment with the […]
...moreA Blind Eye to History
At Aeon, Robert Neer discusses the particular absence of military history from American universities. While general history courses cover the overall societal impact of some military campaigns and political science covers the effect of military action on government, Neer notes a lack of scholarship (and scrutiny) from academics on military action since the Vietnam War.
...moreThe Dilemma of Wartime Journalism
At Guernica, Richard Falk discusses journalism during the Vietnam War and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how remaining ‘objective’ is actually being biased by turning a blind-eye to suffering: I came to realize that the journalistic ethos as applied to foreign policy was indifferent to the wartime suffering of the enemy population and a humanitarian catastrophe […]
...moreSelf-Published Acts of Plagiarism
A man from Alberta, Canada, tried to pass off bestselling author Robert Mason’s memoir Chickenhawk as his own. And readers weren’t the only ones duped by Dennis Surrendi’s lies. His stepdaughter stated that the family had no reason to think his experiences in Vietnam had happened to someone else. Mason said he won’t sue for […]
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
Author Viet Thanh Nguyen discusses his debut novel, The Sympathizer, new ways of looking at the Vietnam War, and how to blend important ideas with entertainment.
...more
War Narratives #1: Truth and Fiction
The notion that the truth about combat cannot be described in a book goes back to the American Civil War, at least.
...moreThe Secrets of the Past
Over at the New Yorker, a journalist returns to what was almost the last town he ever reported on.
...more
The Rumpus Interview with Tomi Ungerer
Writer and illustrator Tomi Ungerer discusses his exile in Ireland, being a target of censorship, and his work’s recent resurgence of popularity in the US.
...more
First-Class Guilt
But I had deployed only once to Iraq. When so many others, including friends of mine, had suffered two, three, four, five, or more deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, why should I be the one enjoying the comfort of flying first-class?
...moreA Soldier’s Handbook
The New York Review of Books covers the recently published guidebook given to American soldiers before heading to Vietnam: “Most American soldiers landing in Vietnam in the 1960s were handed a ninety-three-page booklet called A Pocket Guide to Vietnam. Produced by the Department of Defense, it described how small, well-proportioned, dignified, and restrained Vietnamese people are, how the […]
...more