Hopeful Acts: Talking with Krys Malcolm Belc
Krys Malcolm Belc discusses his debut memoir, THE NATURAL MOTHER OF THE CHILD.
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Posts Tagged: W.G. Sebald
Criticism as a Life Practice: A Conversation with Yxta Maya Murray
Yxta Maya Murray discusses her new novel, ART IS EVERTHING.
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The Danger Is Beauty: Talking with Éireann Lorsung
Éireann Lorsung discusses her new collection of poetry, THE CENTURY.
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How to Write about Nothing: Kate Zambreno’s Drifts
But the evasion is purposeful, and the purpose is to marvelous effect.
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What Remains of a Self: Joanna Luloff’s Remind Me Again What Happened
Remind Me Again What Happened becomes a story not just of selfhood, but also of sovereignty.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #145: Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint
“Categories are, by definition, externally created and applied.”
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Jesse Ball
Jesse Ball discusses his new novel, Census, the inherent sinister nature of institutions, and creating imaginary authors.
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The Third Iago Sensibility: A Conversation with Laurie Stone
Laurie Stone discusses her story collection, My Life as an Animal, writing about death, how the reader doesn’t care about you, and the Third Iago.
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The Earth Recycles All of Us: Talking with Micheline Aharonian Marcom
Micheline Aharonian Marcom discusses her novel, The Brick House, female sexuality in literature, and transcendence through dreaming.
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Aurvi Sharma
Aurvi Sharma discusses her memoir-in-progress, finding inspiration in ancient women’s voices, and writing against erasure.
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Shifting Histories: Belladonna by Daša Drndić
The past may be riddled with holes, but it cannot be dispensed with as easily as possessions.
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Every Woman Is a Nation unto Herself: A Conversation with Sabina Murray
Sabina Murray discusses the novel Valiant Gentleman, writing characters that are fundamentally different from herself, and confronting issues of colonization.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #72: Laurie Sheck
Laurie Sheck is the author, most recently, of Island of the Mad, and A Monster’s Notes, a re-imagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Pulitzer Prize finalist in poetry for The Willow Grove, she has been a Guggenheim Fellow, as well as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and at the […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Emily Raboteau
Emily Raboteau discusses her essay, “Know Your Rights!” from the collection, The Fire This Time, what she loves about motherhood, and why it’s time for White America to get uncomfortable.
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Christine Sneed
Floyd Skloot interviews Christine Sneed about her latest story collection, The Virginity of Famous Men.
...moreTo Speak Unsatisfactorily
To 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 […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Garth Greenwell
Garth Greenwell discusses his debut novel, What Belongs to You, crossing boundaries, language as defense, and the queer tradition of novel writing that blurs boundaries between fiction and essay and autobiography.
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My Evenings Reading Alone
For nearly ten years I had lain beside him: the snoring was a blow, but, looking back, it was also a necessary portent, an etch in our story, the fuzzy spot on a picture frame you can’t tell is from the photograph aging or a fingerprint that left its caressing mark on the glass.
...moreThe Emigrants
Can we trust Sebald’s words? It doesn’t matter. The fragmented motifs, repeated images, are scattered throughout the texts and sweep you along to a conclusion, at which there magically appears sense to the whole. Verily, the field has been thoroughly sniffed out. I imagine it’s something like listening to a piece of classical music, if […]
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The Walk by Robert Walser
Robert Walser’s legendary novella Der Spaziergang (The Walk), the first work of his to appear in English and the only one to be translated during his lifetime, is now available in the revised version he published three years after the original edition of 1917. Susan Bernofsky (who has translated numerous works of Walser’s including The […]
...more“Poet of the Disregarded”
At The Book Bench, Teju Cole reviews Across the Land and the Water, the first major volume of poems by W. G. Sebald. Walking us through the collection, Cole sheds light on the progression of Sebald’s poetic voice, technique, and concerns. “He had a feeling for the inanimate, too, for ruins and comminuted landscapes, places that […]
...moreToteninsel in English
New in English, Gerhard Meier’s 1979 Isle of the Dead recalls W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn as two friends traverse their town, discussing nature and death in elegant prose.
...moreThe Visual World Of W.G. Sebald
“Sebald is brilliantly visual. He makes you realize with some discomfort that you often fail to look attentively enough at what you see. Another novelist referred to the “phenomenal configuration” of the author’s mind and what astonishes and delights in Sebald’s sentences, superbly rendered by his translators, is his ability to convey not just the […]
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