Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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The Promise of Deliverance, The Potential for Doom: A Conversation with Scott Broker
“This book hopes to challenge the myth that there is any one right way to be an artist, primarily by showing how many contradictory answers people try to give you to that question. What works for any one person is…
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Pinayrish American
I was obsessed with their costumes; I wanted a sash embroidered with Celtic knots and a flared velvet circle skirt. (This is likely when my lifelong obsessions with highly specific uniforms began.) I wanted a headful of bouncy curls and…
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The AWP 2026 Flash Fiction Contest Winners
At AWP this year, we held a fun flash fiction contest. Interested writers only had to write a short short story on the back of one of our postcards and turn it in by 5 p.m. on Saturday. For the…
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Sound kept
“Description is a genre and so necessarily reductive. / What feels important to know is that there are logistical concerns re: theories of death.” OR “Impossible descriptions are made more gruesome in their optimistic attempt. / Up and then not.…
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Notes from the Playground
I am four years old, standing on the playground of the Jewish Community Center where I go to nursery school. My best friend Alice is not here today. Alice is my only friend. She lives in a bigger house than…
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The Problem and Gift of Writing from Memory: A Conversation with Preeti Vangani
“I think people have started reading poetry as memoir, and I think fiction writers also suffer from that kind of readership, where everything that happened to the character has happened to the writer as well. I want to continuously challenge…
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Fiction as Containers for Memory: A Conversation with Rainbow Rowell
Rainbow Rowell writes a lot of things—comic books, graphic novels, fantasy stories with a distinct Drarry undertone (yeah, Harry Potter and Draco Malfoy kiss in certain corners of the internet)—but she doesn’t write “romance.” At least, not in the traditional…
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Silent Nights
He talked on and on then, about how you’d have to get to the airport very early in the morning or else miss your flight, the X-ray machines at the security, the little cans of soda and bags of pretzels…
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“Like a Bowl Picked Up in the Dark”: A Conversation with Brian Trapp
“I had this very intimate and intense relationship with my brother and thought I knew him best. So I could dramatize that by having it in dialogue, and then thinking about ways in which, if that’s the one true thing,…
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What Holds: Manners and Memory in “The Summer We Ate Off the China”
This refusal to treat trauma as singular or sacred, to set it apart from the texture of ordinary life, is among the collection’s quietly bracing achievements. Jacobson’s stories don’t deny suffering. But they do deny it the dignity of exception…
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Lifesaving
I wasn’t good at managing the cold. It wrestled the breath from me, pressing deep into my chest and throat. Once, when I knew Rob would be out, I cheated and put the heating on, sitting against the radiator and…
