The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Dr. Amra Sabic-El-Rayess
“The difference with memorializing my story is that I have invited others to live it, for a moment.”
...more“The difference with memorializing my story is that I have invited others to live it, for a moment.”
...moreThe speaker in Hard Damage, it seems, is writing herself to life.
...moreIndividual soldiers become a formless mass. War becomes an end in itself.
...moreWhat happens when we play along with something not real—does it become real?
...moreThere is no escape from the cradle of this shame.
...moreAn enjoyable and thought-provoking read, Moon Brow trades on its striking and unusual formal features to allude to the complexities and consequences of war.
...moreSpeech seemed like an irreverence, as if the empty schools were tombs.
...moreIngrid Rojas Contreras discusses her debut novel, FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE.
...moreOn certain nights, if I’m lucky, wisps of the shore begin to glow blue, an unearthly electric color, like someone in the sea has a flashlight and is shining it upward.
...moreOmar El Akkad discusses his debut novel American War, suicide terrorism, fossil fuels, and blankets.
...moreJay Baron Nicorvo discusses his debut novel, The Standard Grand, how easy it is for civilians to forget about soldiers and veterans, and his longstanding love of animals.
...moreAs Sentilles makes clear, she is against the wars the United States is currently involved in, and war in general, but she’s critical of what that means.
...moreRajith Savanadasa discusses his debut novel, Ruins, writing across oceans, and the chance encounter with refugees that led to the story at the heart of his novel.
...moreIn 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 […]
...moreIn Akkad’s dystopian scenario, the US faces a resurgent Mexico and a vast and newly powerful North African-Arabian empire.
...moreIn the face of colossal and destructive political lies, we need a more nuanced understanding of the world than simply truth versus lie.
...moreSchultz enables readers to see past their own perspectives and empathize with both the Afghan child and the American war widow.
...moreWelcome to This Week in Books, where we highlight books just released by small and independent presses. Books have always been a symbol for and means of spreading knowledge and wisdom, and they are an important part of our toolkit in fighting for social justice. If we’re going to move our national narrative away from […]
...moreThere should be no forgetting, much less forgiveness, of what happened during the Vietnam War.
...moreFor NPR Books, Quil Lawrence talks with a handful of soldiers-turned-authors about the genre of war literature that has been catalyzed by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These authors want their audiences to know that war is not all Hollywood-scale battle scenes, and warn against the glamorization of war stories and hero-worshipping of veterans.
...moreWhitney Terrell discusses war, gender, and fiction vs. reality in his new novel, The Good Lieutenant, about a female soldier in Iraq.
...moreWhen you’re writing fiction, you can follow your own ignorance. You can write something and realize how flawed you are.
...moreWhat would I even say if I was to answer that long-awaited phone call? Would the light of forgiveness carry me fearlessly into tomorrow?
...moreEach character achieves independence in his own way, but independence winds up looking a lot like loneliness.
...moreMatt Gallagher on blogging during his time in the Army, his memoir Kaboom and forthcoming novel Youngblood, and what makes for good literary fiction about wartime.
...moreWriter and former US Army infantryman Colin D. Halloran on his new collection, Icarian Flux, how he used experimental narrative to explore his life with PTSD, and why he doesn’t want to be known only as a “war poet.”
...more[I]f we don’t explore wartime trauma in literature, we will never understand war’s impact in personal or social terms; never understand the incredible variety of responses to trauma, with all its nuances and exceptions.
...moreThe notion that the truth about combat cannot be described in a book goes back to the American Civil War, at least.
...moreLuke Mogelson delivers some short fiction at the New Yorker, about a National Guardsman down on his luck.
...moreIt was a really big deal for me that a Sri Lankan publisher picked it up. I didn’t grow up there, and I didn’t go through [the war], so there’s always been a question of legitimacy. When I was at the Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation (VONA) workshop in 2011, I had these tremendous […]
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