Rumpus Original Archives - The Rumpus

Morally complicating your world view: A Conversation with Steve Almond

With fiction, you’re trying to get people emotionally attached to your characters, not to learn a lesson. Ideally, [readers] get emotionally attached to the characters and those characters’ experiences leave them, in the end, feeling more than they did before.

A man with an oxygen tank cooks at a stove

Rumpus Original Fiction: Dream People

I am embarrassed by how it scares me, getting older. By how the fear has guided every decision. By the math I’m always doing in my head, working back from fifty-two. If I die at the same age my dad died, Brody will be twenty-six, which is old enough.

Olga Khersonska

A Poem as a Shield and a Prayer: An Interview with Lyudmyla Khersonska

People want to have somebody helping them with the names of things, for someone may forget words during the war. A poem is like a shield and a prayer.

Christina Garcia

Balancing all the parts to the whole arc: A conversation with Cristina García

I feel like in my own experience and experience of many people I see, there is tremendous competition for narrative. For me, it’s interesting to see what pans out.

How to Love Everyone Cover

As with Vigor, As with Pain: A Review of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It

Egger’s sentences jump from one point to another, perhaps mirroring in her language how the speakers jump from one bed into another—the next temporary stop is wherever desire leads her to be.

The Cost of Belonging: Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu

In this vortex of language and culture, the translator’s task is all the more essential and Jennifer Shyue’s translation from Spanish is both precise and poetic. In addition to the music of the prose, Shyue does justice to the multiple vernacular at play, bringing two unlike cultures into the portrait of a single man.

“Being in Uncertainties”: A Conversation with Maureen N. McLane

A lot of poems want to place you in the darting mind of the poem. Some want to address you—as “the beloved,” say, or as someone hated, or they implicitly situate you as an overhearer of such an address. But poems can also be spaceships offering interstellar as well as time travel.

What to Read When Remembering Milan Kundera

Though I am often at least the typist behind many of the posts authored by The Rumpus, I am keeping my name on this one as it’s very much a…

Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Fady Joudah

The bees would not miss us if the entire neighborhood went missing. / The reverse isn’t true. The mind goes to self // as the self comes to mind. / The mind tells the self, I made you, / and the self asks, who gave you that idea?

Amnesia and Abject Terror Are Prerequisites: A Conversation With Ruth Madievsky

You don’t read literary fiction if you’re looking for tight little answers to life’s mysteries.

Nothing Special cover

The Burden of Being Real: Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special

To see oneself and one’s people as real: this is the only way out of the shadow of the special.

David Groff

The In-Between-ness of Things: An Interview with David Groff

What would it mean to embrace being generative? To have a different way of taking on a responsibility for creating more life on the planet?

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