Periphery: Exploring Bombs, Boundaries, and Family History
Have you ever seen a feathery shadow at the edge of your eye? Was it a figure? Did it cross into your vision, like a hummingbird there and gone?
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Posts Tagged: WWII
TORCH: My Father’s Mansion
I love the United States, too. Like a house I was raised in, though, I know it up close and can spot its many fissures.
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Readers Report: The New Patriot
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “The New Patriot.”
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #32: Make the Soup
I am meditating. In a room in Rodeo, at the rickety old secretary/dresser I use as a desk. It is by a window. I look out at the roadway, and think I am glad to live at a crossroad. The house across the street is silver grey. By its front stoop is a tree all […]
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #31: Pulling the Trigger on Father’s Day
June is an ambivalent month for me. As a child it meant the start of summer vacation, and weeks spent at my grandparent’s beautiful beach home in Hyannisport. This was wonderful because it meant spending time with my siblings and seven cousins, a houseful of children of all ages, and loving—even adoring—grandparents, aunts, and uncles. […]
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tamiko Nimura
Tamiko Nimura talks about the influence of history, memory, and silence on her work; creating a private MFA for herself; and writing a generational memoir.
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Finishing What You Start: A Conversation with Musician Matt Kivel
Matt Kivel discusses his latest release, Fires on the Plain, the ways in which cinema inspires his music, and how he reads his critics.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Living Wound
Ancestors need a scratch, a stretch sometimes, too.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Lucy Jane Bledsoe discusses her latest book, A Thin Bright Line, uncovering the remarkable story of her aunt, and illuminating history through the lens of imagination.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Chris Santiago
Chris Santigo on his new collection Tula, writing a multilingual text, and the connections between music and writing poetry.
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The Rumpus Interview with Vanessa Hua
Vanessa Hua discusses her debut collection, Deceit and Other Possibilities, writing fiction in order to understand life as an American-born child of immigrants, and the importance of literary community.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #60: Leah Kaminsky
Leah Kaminsky’s debut novel, The Waiting Room, depicts one fateful day in the life of an Australian doctor and mother, Dina, living in Haifa, Israel. Dina is trying to maintain normalcy as she goes about her work as a family doctor, cares for her son, and fights to preserve her faltering relationship with her husband, […]
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Dedicate Your No-Trump Vote: Morris Collins
Trump is on the ballot; we don’t need weapons to repudiate him, but the Blackshirts are marching in our streets.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 4): “Roosters”
the roosters brace their cruel feet and glare // with stupid eyes / while from their beaks there rise / the uncontrolled, traditional cries.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: 21 Poems That Shaped America (Pt. 2): “Ave Maria”
Mothers of America / let your kids go to the movies!
...moreWriter, Storyteller, Pilot, Spy
Though he fled the country as soon as possible, the writer would maintain an affection for Canada that lasted throughout his life. Over at The Walrus, Michael Hingston explores Roald Dahl’s time at Camp X—a World War II army base in Canada for the British Security Coordination, a covert intelligence organization. Dahl was sent there […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Raeff
Married authors Anne Raeff and Lori Ostlund, both winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, discuss their craft, their process, and the way they negotiate the give and take involved in sharing a vocation.
...moreStories in Their Hair
Jessica Miller writes for Catapult on hair during World War II, using the practical reality of people’s hair to glimpse into war’s ordinary life and extraordinary horrors.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: The Suit
It was as if he understood that the authentic must begin in the voice. And through the texture of the voice—its moral and psychological claims—sensory details emerge with absolute authority.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Used to Be Schwartz
When I told my friend Aharon that my family name used to be Schwartz, he said, “Used to be Schwartz—sounds like a Borscht Belt act.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Kathleen Spivack
Poet Kathleen Spivack discusses releasing her debut novel Unspeakable Things at age seventy-seven.
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The Rumpus Interview with Bruce Bauman
Bruce Bauman discusses his latest book, Broken Sleep, why rock isn’t dead (yet), how humor makes life bearable, and why we should reinstate the draft.
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Home Is Where
Helen Levinson was fourteen years old in the 1940s when she left Lublin, Poland. I was fifteen years old in 2005 when I arrived.
...moreBut Is It Dangerous?
Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf has recently become legal to publish and sell in Germany for the first time since World War II. What place does this volume hold in our collective world history? And should it be regarded as a dangerous book? The New Yorker explores.
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Moles and All
Of the moments Lemmy and I shared, I have no proof, no hard evidence, no transcript. Our conversation is lost in cyberspace, one Tuesday afternoon easily evaporated.
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Michel Tournier and the Novel of Ideas
Do novels think?
...moreThe Enduring Ordinariness of Parisian Life
We’re defiant, but shaky. We can’t get over what we’ve seen, what we’ve heard, who we’ve lost, and we don’t really want to. But we’ll eventually get used to the fact that it happened. It will become part of our daily lives. Over at Lit Hub, Lauren Elkin reflects on the writer George Perec and […]
...moreA Figurative Recovery from War
In his review for Hyperallergic of a new MOMA exhibit, Thomas Micchelli writes about the work of artists during and immediately after their experiences in World War II. In the exhibit, Soldier, Spectre, Shaman: The Figure and the Second World War, Micchelli claims that the 20th century art historical record finally will be reconciled with […]
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