From the Archive: Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Morgan Parker
I am only as lonely / as anybody else, I say / at lunch downtown, examining / my worth.
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We Are More: The Bad Ones
“My father says he’s sorry about the noise, but he wants you to know that we wouldn’t even be here if it wasn’t for 1953 and the American overthrow of Iran’s democracy.”
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You Don’t See the Whole Young Man until the Very End: An Interview with Douglas Stuart
The amount of pressure on young men still to get on with it and to bottle it up and to be strong and be certain is overwhelming. And it shows in the UK. The suicide rates for men are so high. It’s a mental health issue. We don’t allow men to express themselves or talk about their vulnerability, and we blame them for a lot; we get to that phrase “toxic masculinity” really quickly. I don’t believe masculinity is always toxic, I just think sometimes it’s very unhealthy and we need to examine it and open it up.
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A Sultry Register: Nichole Perkins’s Sometimes I Trip On How Happy We Could Be
In early May I was scrolling through Twitter when I came across a post from author Nichole Perkins that piqued my interest. It was a sexy tweet—in a string of sexier tweets—dissecting actor Jake Johnson’s ability to convincingly exude lust on camera. In a thread supported by illustrative gifs and evocative language like “little moan” […]
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Feeling Comfortable Enough to Be Funny Is What Makes Me Want to Write Fiction: A Conversation with Megan Giddings
There was a long stretch where I tried actively not to make things I wrote funny because of a disastrous undergrad fiction workshop where I spent thirty minutes just listening to people complain that a story had jokes. And wouldn’t it have been so much better if the author had let us pay attention to the emotions? Lol.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Genesis
The speed boat moves fast and Genesis notices Kayla’s hair keeps getting into her eyes. She laughs, as do all the others, who bounce up and down and let out high-pitched screams each time the boat rides a wave up into the air before crashing back down on the choppy water. Kayla grips the edge […]
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ENOUGH: Survivor Sisterhood
“We both survived him,” I said.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Poetry: Four Poems by sam sax
how many men have / passed through this room, through my lips?
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September Spotlight: Letters in the Mail
Chatting with some of September’s Letters in the Mail featured authors about books and birds.
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Calibrations: On Niina Pollari’s Path of Totality
Throughout the collection New York City reflects a unique landscape of loss, a space as full of grief as it is of everyday life, scientific facts, memory, motherhood, healing, love, and hope.
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A Hypnotic Transitory Beauty Quest: A Conversation with Jackson Bliss
While many Californians are obsessed with “living in the moment,” most Asian Americans I know live in a complex cultural space where “the moment” is the superstructure and history is the base.
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The Young Girl Writes Back: Elif Batuman’s Either/Or
If she just wrote about her own life, perhaps she could produce something that rivals Portrait of a Lady. Yet none of the books she reads are actually written by women.
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Footnotes on a love story
Before they were married, they met in a photograph.
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RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: A FAVORITE ROOM BY CHEN CHEN
An excerpt from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club‘s September selection, Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency by Chen Chen forthcoming from BOA Editions on September 13, 2022 Subscribe by August 15 to the Book Club to receive this title and an invitation to an exclusive conversation with the author via Crowdcast A Favorite […]
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When Silences Need to Be Broken: Talking with Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Language is inexact, and will always be an approximation. In my own experience of amnesia, there was a period of time where things didn’t have names, and it was in that nameless, getting-to-know-something that I felt I knew it better.
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Funny Women: The Adventure of the Mistaken Right Swipe
It turns out freelance homicide detective actually is a job, and he’s super good at it.
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Frederick Speers
suddenly / we & our dream / of humanity are / all the rage / a star or what / passes / for one
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RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: HYSTERIA REBOOT BY ELISSA BASSIST
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club’s September selection, Hysterical by Elissa Bassist
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If You Eat It, It Becomes Authentic: A Conversation About Red Sauce with Ian MacAllen
There is this moment where you must first cut yourself off from doing more research because that rabbit trail goes on forever in some cases . . . You have to ask yourself, “Do I have enough?”
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The Lucky Ones
I live my life through the twin tenets of curiosity and close observation. I believe imagination and storytelling are central to our survival as a species—and yet, it’s my imagination that makes me jumpy.
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RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT BY Sarah Thankam Mathews
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club’s August selection, ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT by Sarah Thankam Mathews
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Wrestling with Ghosts: Joseph Han’s Nuclear Family
“Mostly,” this novel warns us, “the dead are at peace. But when they are not, this is when they may ask something of us, attempt to guide our lives to fulfill what they could not.”
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From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Mustard Seeds
At the end of the week, which was long with sleepless nights, Miri picked her heart out of the kitchen sink, put it in a paper lunch bag, and took it to the witch.
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Honoring the Past That Built Us: Talking with Kali Fajardo-Anstine
All of my writing is guided by the need to feel culturally seen and acknowledged as a vital part of the American identity.
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Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Joy Katz
birthmother miss
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If You’re Bengali, Food is the Center of Everything: An Interview with Madhushree Ghosh
But food is not just a tool for memory, but also important in terms of social justice issues which Indian Americans don’t talk about because we are the model minority. We don’t want to get in trouble.
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Finding Forgiveness in Co-Parenting
I needed him to stay in that box because if he got out of the box before I was ready, I would struggle to hold on to the truth that I had been abused. I would struggle to believe myself.
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Forms of Narrowing: Julie Otsuka’s The Swimmers
After the memorials, the funerals, the endless influx of flowers and casserole dishes and well-meaning texts, the collective retreats back into their lives and all that is left is the individual, grieving for months and years and perhaps even the rest of their own life.
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