The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Song in the Subjunctive
Perhaps the city looked more poignantly lovely because I was conscious of its tragic history.
Posts by tag
WWII
72 posts
The Rumpus Interview with Jay Rubin
Author and translator Jay Rubin talks about his new novel, The Sun Gods, translating Haruki Murakami into English, and the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II.
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.
Charles Simic on Walt Whitman
Poet Charles Simic may prefer the “pleasant aftertaste” of a literary amuse-bouche before bed, but when prompted about one of his favorite literary passages, he chose Walt Whitman’s “A Sight…
The New York Comics and Picture-Story Symposium: William H. Foster III on African Americans in Early American Comic Books, 1940-1950
The New York Comics & Picture-Story Symposium is a weekly forum for discussing the tradition and future of text/image work. Open to the public, it meets Tuesday nights 7-9 p.m.…
Slow and Steady
It took Gene Oishi 50 years to write his debut novel, a story about Japanese American identity and family during and after World War II. Over at The Nervous Breakdown,…
Amis, Oates, and the Foul-Smelling Meadow
Recent [WWII] novels by Susanna Moore and Ayelet Waldman achieve their emotional power by focussing upon characters peripheral to the terrible European history that has nonetheless altered their lives. The…
Gratification Be Postponed
Although it never garnered the intellectual prestige reserved for his contemporary Walter Benjamin’s critical zingers, Stefan Zweig’s work has recently enjoyed a revival at the hands of two publishers. Zweig’s…
Roald Dahl: Fighter Jet Pilot
Who would’ve thunk it? Though WWII explains the Oompa Loompas. All the same, it’s hard to imagine Dahl, Ian Fleming, and William Stephenson as contemporaries, yet the three were apparently…
Mein Führer, the Vegetarian
“Hitler was so paranoid that the British would poison him—that’s why he had fifteen girls taste the food before he ate it himself.” The Associate Press reports the story of ninety-five…
{sound of cicadas}
Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s memoir, A Drifting Life, chronicles the youth and career of a prominent graphic novelist.