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Rumpus Articles
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My Ma’s Hatred Grows Cavities Every Summer
She’d decided, fully cognizant of what I was, to sentence me to a future spent experiencing the depth of other people’s hatred of people like me.
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Who Gets to Decide What Liberation Looks Like?
I don’t want us replacing one set of commandments for women with another set stamped LIBERATION across the top. I don’t want either of us telling women that sleeping with a guy is feminist or not sleeping with a guy…
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Queering Taxonomies: A Conversation with Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn
I think a lot about the often quoted (and sometimes misinterpreted) Joan Didion line: ‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ We have to construct something to make sense of our experience of the world inside our heads, and…
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Seven Days in August
There was grief everywhere: in my drinking water, in my toothbrush, in the whisk I used to beat egg whites for a meringue. Eating a pastrami sandwich could turn me inside out, because it was his favorite; listening to his…
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After the Fall
From the prow of my hip, I see middle age rise like a strange coast on the horizon, close enough now that I can count the rivers,
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When A Tree Falls
Anamika learnt from her mother that the fate of the beautiful was to belong to the rich, to help upgrade their genetic pool till an army of their rich and beautiful offspring ruled the world. Natural selection by devious design.…
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“Breaking the Line Until It Felt Right:” A Conversation with Kendra Allen
Fiction has been so surprising for me—especially whenever I have to speak about the book—because for the first time in my writing life, no one is looking at the ‘I’ as me. There’s recourse in assumption, whereas with memoir—with personal…
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Lux Nightmare Is Not A Porn Star
Just a year and a half prior to finding Shalit’s email in my inbox, I was the proprietor of my very own porn site, That Strange Girl, which I’d started right before my senior year of college. It was a…
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The September Rumpus Book Club Selection: “The Odyssey” with Emily Wilson
Written in iambic pentameter verse, Emily Wilson’s Odyssey is a lean, fleet-footed translation that recaptures Homer’s “nimble gallop” and brings an ancient epic to new life. The New York Times named Wilson’s translation as one of its 100 notable books…
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Black Single Moms Create Wonderful Worlds for Their Kids: A Conversation with Jamilah Lemieux
We have always had very high expectations of Black women. We have always had to do more, be more, give more than most groups of people in this country. So if we can talk openly and honestly about that, I…
