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Ghassan Zeineddine

Staking Ground in Multiple Lands: A Conversation with Ghassan Zeineddine

By Brian Truong

October 9th, 2023

I don’t consciously look for symbols while I’m writing; they come to me from being in the community.

...more

Tags: A Rumpus Interview, Brian Truong, Ghassan Zeineddine

Do a Harry Potter spell to conjure your reproductive rights.

Funny Women: Ways* to Get Reproductive Rights

By Susanna Goldfinger

October 6th, 2023

Click your heels three times and say “there’s no rights like reproductive rights.”

...more

Tags: How to Secure Your Reproductive Rights, Rumpus Funny Women, Susanna Goldfinger

Haunted

By Brendan Stephens and Edie Quinn

October 5th, 2023

Where was she . . . when the fire started?

...more

Tags: Brendan Stephens, Edie Quinn, haunted, Rumpus comic

Dear Outsiders Cover

The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders

By Danielle Hanson

October 4th, 2023

Odd and evocative, Dear Outsiders does what literature does best—it takes the reader into a new world which changes them while it too changes.

...more

Tags: Dear Outsiders, Jenny Sadre-Orafai, Rumpus Reviews

Magical Realism as the Savior of Memory: A Conversation with John Manuel Arias

By Greg Mania

October 4th, 2023

Characters do stuff, and the reader is always going to ask why, and as a writer I’m just as interested.

...more

Tags: A Rumpus Interview, John Manuel Arias, Where There Was Fire

Child-rearing and Novel-writing: Kate Briggs’s The Long Form

By Georgie Devereux

October 3rd, 2023

The Long Form reimagines both this relationship of mother-and-child and the histories and capacities of the novel. In the process, it disrupts these well-worn structures to create something delightfully new.

...more

Tags: Dorothy Publishing Project, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Georgie Devereux, Kate Briggs, The Long Form

Rumpus Original Fiction: She Walks in Fields of Light

By Sarah Royston

October 2nd, 2023

I don’t know if she’s dangerous, or crazy like they say. But in this deadening place, she’s the only live wire.

...more

Tags: Dolan Morgan, Rumpus Original Fiction, Sarah Royston, She Walks in Fields of Light

Jessica Cuello

“Writing is An Insistence Against a World Insisting Otherwise”: A Conversation with Jessica Cuello

By Philip Metres

October 2nd, 2023

Literature is a balm against loneliness. I feel close to these other writers, to the characters in their books, to these women in history.

...more

Carey Salerno

Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Carey Salerno

By Carey Salerno

September 28th, 2023

how exactly to ignite, to speak in sign, what the flashing draws down, damp, out, and what it / means to be a newborn body made of burnt-back embers, drifting over the sidewalk

...more

Tags: Carey Salerno, Glories of the Snow, The June Run: Menagerie

October Spotlight: Letters in the Mail

By The Rumpus

September 27th, 2023

Our next Letters in the Mail come from Ling Ma and Kelly Sather.

...more

Tags: letters in the mail

Vauhini Vara headshot

Negotiating Grief, Shame, Loneliness, and Love: A Conversation with Vauhini Vara

By Madhushree Ghosh

September 27th, 2023

Stories for me are much more like poems than like novels—that is, each of the stories in this collection started with just a vague impression: an experience or imagined vision of one that stuck with me and called to be written down.

...more

Tags: Madhushree Ghosh, This is Salvaged, Vauhini Vara

Voices on Addiction: Whole Pools of It

By Sarah Perret-Goluboff

September 26th, 2023

This time, Mandy calls me. Her words are much quicker. There is the force of meaning behind them, but the slur is still perceivable at the edges.

...more

Tags: Sarah Perret-Goluboff, Voices on Addiction, Whole Pools of It

Caligula cover

The Novelist as Playwright: Albert Camus’s Caligula and Three Other Plays

By Matthew Gasda

September 26th, 2023

Bloom’s translations of these plays remind us that Camus was not a philosopher who used theater to illustrate arguments like Sartre, but a tragic thinker for whom drama was a fundamental and necessary means of literalizing political and ethical metaphors.

...more

Tags: albert camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, Matthew Gasda

A pile of porcelain doll hands

Rumpus Original Fiction: The Dollmaker

By Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal

September 25th, 2023

Sakshi can lay me over her workbench, unstitch my skin, stuff me with fur, and then sew me. She can weave her magic into me. Make me not be myself anymore.

...more

Tags: Apoorva Bradshaw-Mittal, Rumpus Original Fiction, The Dollmaker

Robert Lunday

They’re Both and They’re Neither: A Conversation with Robert Lunday

By Sarah Haas

September 25th, 2023

My stepfather would always tell me, “Don’t think, act. Follow orders.” For me, I want to stop to consider the different angles.

...more

Tags: Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness, Robert Lunday, Sarah Haas

What to Read When Your Spirit Needs a Refresh

By India Lena González

September 22nd, 2023

A reading list from India Adams, author of FOX WOMAN GET OUT!

...more

Piping Hot Bees

Sketch Book Reviews: Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-runners

By Kateri Kramer

September 21st, 2023

Seeley uses historical studies, new findings, charts/graphs, and his absolute love of bees to teach readers.

...more

Tags: Kateri Kramer, Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-runners, Thomas D. Seeley

When I was a freshman in college, I was hungry.

Student Hunger is an Issue on College Campuses

By Rachel Litchman

September 21st, 2023

What can we do to change this?

...more

Tags: comic, Rachel Litchman, Student Hunger is an Issue on College Campuses

The Wet Hex cover

To Mother, To Remember, To Survive: A Review of Sun Yung Shin’s The Wet Hex

By Genevieve Hartman

September 20th, 2023

To be a mother is to have strength, resilience, and ferocity in the face of oppression. It is also to contain the magic and power of creating a new life, of bringing up children, of making a home and a legacy.

...more

Tags: Genevieve Hartman, Sun Yung Shin, The Wet Hex

Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya headshot

Main Character as Witness: A Conversation with Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya

By María Alejandra Barrios

September 20th, 2023

To some extent, I think I was also exploring how witnessing, absorbing, and listening are related to writing, and questioning whether this is a valuable way of approaching a life. I think it can be.

...more

Tags: María Alejandra Barrios, Rodrigo Restrepo Montoya

A person's legs running, wearing sneakers.

Escape Velocity

By L.E. Marshall

September 19th, 2023

But neither of us has said what does matter, or what we want, only what we do not want, and there in his defensive stammering, I can play my final card: You don’t know anything about me.

...more

Tags: Escape Velocity, L.E. Marshall, Rumpus original essay

An abstract image of a man on a boat

Rumpus Original Fiction: Storytellers

By Abhigna Mooraka

September 18th, 2023

The first thing I learn is that storytelling is a strange art. Listening to stories all my life has not, in any way, prepared me to tell my own.

...more

Tags: Abhigna Mooraka, Dmitry Samarov, Storytellers

Myronn Hardy

I See Something I Can’t Shake: A Conversation with Myronn Hardy

By Janet Rodriguez

September 18th, 2023

As a poet, I’m constantly trying to make connections and see between and among things.

...more

Tags: Aurora Americana, Janet Rodriguez, Myronn Hardy

Words as the Way: Rediscovering my Sister and Myself Forty Years After Her Assault

By Beverly Army Williams

September 15th, 2023

No one talked about what had happened to her. No one, at least in my hearing, asked her what she needed. What she wanted. Including me.

...more

Tags: Beverly Army Williams, child sexual assault, family trauma, kidnapping, Rumpus Original

Artress Bethany White

Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Artress Bethany White

By Artress Bethany White

September 14th, 2023

Let’s just walk through the woods to see it / I whispered, in a flash forgetting the nature of guns

...more

Tags: A Black Doe in the Anthropocene, Artress Bethany White

Bianca Cover

Human and No Less Miraculous: The Craft of Explication in Eugenia Leigh’s Bianca

By Asa Drake

September 13th, 2023

Within Bianca, the speaker must choose the life she has over and over again, as a way forward—not as a stoic rendition of the eternal return of the same, but as desire.

...more

Tags: Asa Drake, Bianca, Eugenia Leigh

Daphne Kalotay

The Intimacy of the Short Story: A Conversation with Daphne Kalotay

By Kate Finegan

September 13th, 2023

Compassion is a window, and ideally the reader feels that—even if they’re reading a character whom they don’t necessarily like—this person is a rounded character with good qualities, bad qualities, and in-between qualities.

...more

Tags: Daphne Kalotay, Kate Finegan, The Archivists

from The Book of (More) Delights

By Ross Gay

September 12th, 2023

Anyhow, alas, thanks to my boundless, bottomless, boundaryless ignorance: goddamn and holy shit! Waxing and waning! Have you heard?!?!

...more

Imprisoned by Insomnia: Sleepless by Marie Darrieussecq

By Matti Ben-Lev

September 12th, 2023

Memoir is less common territory for Darrieussecq, but with insomnia, she has found a real-world subject appropriate for her ongoing concerns about making sense of the absurd.

...more

Tags: Marie Darrieussecq, Matti Ben-Lev, Sleepless: a Memoir of Insomnia

The Turbulent Landscape of Identity: A Conversation with Jinwoo Chong

By Yasmin Roshanian

September 11th, 2023

I’ve always wanted to write plot-driven novels that borrow from a lot of different traditions and institutions. That’s something I like most to read, and whenever I write something, I try to write something that I enjoy reading too.

...more

Tags: Flux, Jinwoo Chong, Yasmin Roshanian

More Rumpus »

The Rumpus Blog

Call for Submissions: Parallel Practice

New Column Alert <3

Parallel Practice, a new monthly column at The Rumpus, is edited by our very own Anna Held, whom you may remember from our Mental Health Awareness Month last year.

(more…)

— 4 months ago

Call for Submissions: November ’23 Themed Month

We’re accepting essays (750-4,000 words) by adoptees from 11/1 through 12/31 via Submittable. Publication will be in November 2023. Rumpus Essays Editor (and Book Club coordinator extraordinaire) Lauren J. Sharkey​ will be curating this series, and she’s elaborated on the types of stories (and whom) she is hoping to feature below.
— Eds.

***

When I was three-months-old, I was placed in the arms of an American soldier returning from the parallel that divides Korea. We boarded a plane bound for the United States and my new parents. Raised on Long Island by Irish Catholics, I grew up being reminded how blessed and how lucky I was to have been adopted. Relatives, friends, and strangers assured me the life I led in New York was better than anything my biological parents could have given me.

The dominant adoption narrative that my parents had spared me from a terrible fate, that my birth mother had relinquished me out of love, that I had been  saved . . . that narrative was a third parent—guiding me, shaping me, informing me.

(more…)

— 11 months ago

BONUS Member Giveaways, Join NOW!

As I type this, we’re at 149 Rumpus Members, which puts us not-quite a third of the way (29%) toward our June goal of 500.

By now (a little more than halfway through June), we were hoping to be a bit past the mid-point of 250 members. Even though our 500 Member goal is way less than 1% of the people who read the magazine every day, there’s a lot of chaotic energy out there and maybe some of you are even on vacation (a future we’d like to imagine)?!

To encourage readers to join sooner than later (and to reduce our anxiety levels) we’ve adding some bonus incentives.

The earliest Members have the best chances of receiving a bonus gift this month as you’ll be entered into every raffle following signup. If you’ve already joined us as a Member, you’re automatically included in ALL the drawings!

Join by 3 pm ET on Friday, June 17 . .

  • Five members will win the amazing Always Carry A Book tote from our friends at Pilsen Community Books in Chicago. (update: winners contacted for this giveaway!)

Join by 5 pm Tuesday, June 21. . .

  • Five members will win a Graywolf Press tote containing a bundle of recent release faves: Wonderlands (our July Book Club pick!) by Charles Baxter, Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn, and Life is Everywhere by Lucy Ives.


Join by 5 pm Thursday, June 23 . . . 

  • Three members will win a Coffee House Press tote containing a bundle of recent release faves: Borealis by Aisha Sabatini Sloan (which just won TWO Lammy awards); When Women Kill by Alia Trabucco Zerán, trans. Sophie Hughes; and Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda, trans. Sarah Booker.

Some fine-ish print:

  • We will email winners the day of each raffle to ask for preferred mailing address (unfortunately, we can only ship to the US). We’re happy to ship to a friend if you’d like to gift or share a prize.
  • No one will win more than once, to keep things fair and give everyone better odds. So the sooner you become a Member, the more chances you’ll have of winning something cool!
  • Stay tuned as we’ll have additional bonus literary gifts from friends-of-The-Rumpus come through this month.


JOIN NOW!

We appreciate all the indie bookstores, presses, and authors who are stepping up to show their support and help us get closer to our 500 Member goal. It’s good to be part of a literary community that understands that our survival is interconnected. Thank you, thank you!

— 1 year ago

From the Archive: Sketch Book Reviews: How I Became a Tree by Sumana Roy

An illustrated review of Sumana Roy’s new essay collection, HOW I BECAME A TREE!

(more...)

— 1 year ago

Call for Submissions: September ’22 Themed Month

Education is perhaps the most vulnerable and intimate experience people can have with each other that is not familial or romantic. It’s so easy for the classroom to be either harmful—consider the destruction of a person’s curiosity and confidence in learning is muddled by shame or helplessness— or transformative when done well—empowering a student to take charge of their experience of the world.

Open submissions: June 1 – June 30 via Submittable

(more…)

— 1 year ago

Announcing the June Book Club Picks

Though the temperatures may suggest otherwise, it’s time to start thinking about summertime reads. Our June book club picks are Night of the Living Rez, a debut collection of stories by Morgan Talty, and Refuse to Disappear, by Tara Betts.

(more…)

— 1 year ago

Announcing May Book Club Picks

We’re delighted to share with you our May Book Club selections.

(more…)

— 1 year ago

From the Archive: Sketch Book Reviews: Girlhood by Melissa Febos

This essay was first published in The Rumpus on May 4, 2021.

Girlhood, written by Melissa Febos and released on March 30, 2021 from Bloomsbury, is a gripping set of essays about the forces that shape young girls and the adults they become. Throughout the collection, Febos examines the narratives women are told about what it means to be female—and what it takes to free oneself from these narratives.

***

— 1 year ago

Call for Submissions: We Are More

We Are More is an inclusive series for Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) and SWANA diaspora writers, curated by Michelle Zamanian. Our open reading period will begin on March 15, 2022 and will continue until April 15, 2022. Submissions will be received through Submittable. 

(more…)

— 1 year ago

Call for Submissions: Themed Month

I forget that not everyone grew up with flying cockroaches. When my brother-in-law got into grad school in Atlanta, I warned him about them, how they were most active after dark.

“You can kill them,” I said. “But not the big ones. If they’re pregnant, the babies will scatter across the room.”

(more…)

— 1 year ago

Sketchbook Reviews: Body Work by Melissa Febos

— 1 year ago

Hello, Goodbye (CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: COMICS)

After nearly eight years at The Rumpus, Brandon Hicks is passing on the Comics section to incoming editor Colleen Kolba.

Fun fact: Paul and Colleen both had work published by The Rumpus’ very first Comics Editor Paul Madonna. You can read their pieces here and here.

(more…)

— 1 year ago

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: FICTION

Exciting news:

Here at The Rumpus we are again open for original fiction submissions through the end of February.

We are interested in stories that have layers, with elements of surprise and unexpected stakes and points of tension running beneath. Rumpus stories have an edge and a voice we haven’t heard before. They tackle emotional depth while not being at all sentimental. We love it when a story’s language, plot, and characters feel palpable and dynamic on the page, and a strong sense of place goes a long way. Show us something new, bold, brash, alive. Want some examples? Read through our previously published stories.

(more…)

— 1 year ago

Sketch Book Reviews: Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad

Between Two Kingdoms: What Almost Dying Taught Me About Living, written by Suleika Jaouad and released on February 9, 2021 from Penguin Random House, is an insightful and often heartbreaking illness memoir. Throughout the memoir, Jaouad deeply examines what we know about illness, caretaking, and recovery.

***

— 1 year ago

Call for Submissions: ENOUGH

This was first published on December 1, 2021.

***Edit** We have extended this submissions window through January 31

ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for work by women, trans, and nonbinary people who engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence. We will open a reading period for new submissions from January 1 through January 31. We know a holiday season is coming up for many, and that this time of year can be especially difficult. We invite you to share your voice with us. Submissions will be received through Submittable. (Please note: the category will appear on Submittable, with complete guidelines, on January 1, 2022.) (more…)

— 1 year ago

More Blog »
Book Reviews
Dear Outsiders Cover

The World of Family and the Otherworldly: Jenny Sadre-Orafai’s Dear Outsiders

Reviewed By
Danielle Hanson

Tags: Dear Outsiders, Jenny Sadre-Orafai, Rumpus Reviews

Child-rearing and Novel-writing: Kate Briggs’s The Long Form

Reviewed By
Georgie Devereux

Tags: Dorothy Publishing Project, Fitzcarraldo Editions, Georgie Devereux, Kate Briggs, The Long Form

Caligula cover

The Novelist as Playwright: Albert Camus’s Caligula and Three Other Plays

Reviewed By
Matthew Gasda

Tags: albert camus, Caligula and Three Other Plays, Matthew Gasda

Piping Hot Bees

Sketch Book Reviews: Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-runners

Reviewed By
Kateri Kramer

Tags: Kateri Kramer, Piping Hot Bees and Boisterous Buzz-runners, Thomas D. Seeley

The Wet Hex cover

To Mother, To Remember, To Survive: A Review of Sun Yung Shin’s The Wet Hex

Reviewed By
Genevieve Hartman

Tags: Genevieve Hartman, Sun Yung Shin, The Wet Hex

HELLO

Founded in 2009, The Rumpus is one of the longest running independent online literary and culture magazines. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to be a platform for risk-taking voices and writing that might not find a home elsewhere. We lift up new voices alongside those of more established writers readers already know and love.

We believe that literature builds community—and if reading The Rumpus makes you feel more connected, please show your support! Get your Rumpus merch in our online store. Subscribe to the Rumpus Poetry Book Clubs, and Letters in the Mail from authors. And join us by becoming a monthly or yearly Member.

Each of these subscription programs along with tax-deductible donations made to The Rumpus through our fiscal sponsor, Fractured Atlas, helps keep us going and brings us closer to sustainability. The Rumpus is a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a non-profit arts service organization. Contributions for the charitable purposes of The Rumpus must be made payable to “Fractured Atlas” only and are tax-deductible to the extent permitted by law.

© 2023, The Rumpus.

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