Robert Rubsam

New York

Writer and Editor at Freelance

Books, movies, the arts: NYT Magazine, Baffler, Washington Post, Atlantic, Paris Review, Liberties. Commonweal Contributing Writer. Hire me: [email protected]

Articles

Review | ‘Journey to the Edge of Life’ tells of a literary pilgrimage

2 weeks ago | washingtonpost.com | Robert Rubsam

By Tezer Özlü, translated from Turkish by Maureen FreelyThe narrator of Özlü’s gorgeous novel, originally published in 1983 and recently translated into English, is a woman much like the writer herself: Turkish, middle-aged, hungry for love and deeply alienated from her surroundings.
Into the Wild

3 weeks ago | commonwealmagazine.org | Robert Rubsam

About ten years ago, during a season of great freedom, I went for a hike in the Scottish Highlands. I had been living for some months in Ireland, thumbing rides and climbing mountains, and I had taken the boat to the Knoydart Peninsula to see how far I could push things. One morning, I set out to climb Ladhar Bheinn, a trip I’d been told would last seven or eight hours.
Keita Morimoto turns Tokyo into a nocturnal no-man’s-land

1 month ago | apollo-magazine.com | Robert Rubsam

Keita Morimoto is a nocturnal artist. He paints urban life between dusk and dawn, a lonely crepuscular cityscape of dark buildings and fluorescent lights. The brand-new works collected in ‘To Nowhere and Back’ (the majority date from 2025) at Almine Rech’s Tribeca gallery, construct a dreamlike picture of Tokyo after dark, where isolated figures gather at lonely intersections without ever meeting. Morimoto was born in Osaka and in 2006 he moved to Canada to study art in Toronto.
Checking In #2

1 month ago | robertrubsam.substack.com | Robert Rubsam

Happy spring, all. Just because this country is falling apart at the hands of belligerent idiots and authoritarian nihilists doesn’t mean that I can just stop writing. First, the CRB published an excerpt of my novelTo the Madhouse as a story titled “The Garden Party.” It’s the first piece of fiction I’ve published in nearly five years, and if you like it, there’s quite a lot more like it in the book. I’ll include an excerpt below.
The Traveler and the World: Miguel Gomes’s “Grand Tour”

1 month ago | mubi.com | Robert Rubsam

Miguel Gomes’s Grand Tour premieres in theaters on March 28 before coming to MUBI on April 18. Some years ago, I traveled nearly the length of Russia on the Trans-Siberian Railroad. That winter was warm, as nearly all are now, but a Siberian winter is still winter by any definition, and for two weeks I shivered my way from Ulaanbaatar to Moscow.
Putting a Splintered Life Back Together

1 month ago | theatlantic.com | Robert Rubsam

In 1940, just before his death, the theorist Walter Benjamin conjured a famous metaphor for watching the past: the “Angel of History.” The angel was inspired by a print, Angelus Novus, by his friend Paul Klee, which features a great and beneficent being with his wings spread wide. Whereas we humans experience life as a chain of chronological events, the angel, Benjamin writes, faces the past and watches a tower of debris growing taller and taller, burying the victims of history.
The Garden Party — Cleveland Review of Books

1 month ago | clereviewofbooks.com | Robert Rubsam

Down in the courtyard beneath the blooming ginko, Nelly Blum handed us each an invitation. The card was heavy in my hand, and in old-style type it announced that on the afternoon of June 23rd, 1913, she would host a great Midsummer gathering at her estate on a lake to the west of Berlin. This party was the latest iteration of a long family tradition.
Netflix is gobbling up world literature. What could go wrong?

1 month ago | afr.com | Robert Rubsam

Robert RubsamMar 18, 2025 – 1.09pm or Subscribe to save articleSubscribe to gift this articleGift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Subscribe nowAlready a subscriber? I’m thinking of a piece of filmed entertainment. It was adapted from a famous, internationally significant novel. It was blessed with lavish budgets, accomplished directors, ambitious visual design.
Call Me Ishmaelle by Xiaolu Guo

2 months ago | the-tls.co.uk | Dinah Birch |Robert Rubsam |Karen Leeder |Kate Mcloughlin

It is easy to see why an enterprising novelist might want to revisit a nineteenth-century classic. Conversations between writers of different generations can challenge stale assumptions. And there are practical advantages for both publisher and author. Dedicated fans of the original book will constitute something approaching a guaranteed readership. With luck, the novel might be paired with its literary parent on an academic syllabus.
The Dissenters by Youssef Rakha

2 months ago | the-tls.co.uk | Kate Mcloughlin |Robert Rubsam |Karen Leeder |Dinah Birch

She’s “a fractal of our country, her biography a variation on its history, a version of the same story”, says Nour of Mouna, his shape-shifting mother, and of his birth country, Egypt. Nour is the letter writer of Youssef Rakha’s epistolary novel The Dissenters, the first that the Egyptian author, poet and essayist has written in English.