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“Wide-Leg Poems”: A Conversation with Cynthia Manick
Emotions don’t change, we all know love and joy. We all know pain. We all know “trying to find love.”
A Mortal Education: Bernardo Zannoni’s My Stupid Intentions
In one of Solomon’s early lessons, he pushes Archy toward thoughts of his own mortality for the first time before offering religion as a solution to existential dread.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Get Gone
Every customer with perfect lipstick and a hard-lined face reminded me of Mom. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a year.
“Speculative Fiction as a Survival Tool:” A Conversation with C Pam Zhang
Failure is an inevitable part of the process. The faster you get through your failure, the faster you’ll get to the end.
Ghosts in the Mirror
My adoptive mother tells me I was precocious enough as a toddler to ask if I came from her belly. She says this was a sign I comprehended my adoption so early she never had to explain it to me.
The Antihero: A Conversation with Kim Foster
I had to change the parameters of what I thought success was. Success might be a plate of eggs with toast or a talk on the curb. Sometimes the most simple thing is the thing that makes the difference. I
Voices on Addiction: I’m Not Eating
I want to tell her that starving softens the edges of everything. When I’m not eating, only the moment at the end makes me feel present.
Debtors to a Mercy We Never Begged For
No, home is not as simple as the heart-shaped sandwiches Ma placed into my lunch bag on Valentine’s Day or the way my father confessed to listening to me sing shower showtunes or washing a car beside my brother as the summer sun beat down.
The Rumpus 2023 Gift Guide
Okay, a quick confession—I’m terrible at gifting. I occasionally land on the mark, but most of the time my ideas are either wild guesses or something thrown together in a panic, and I often fall back on the classics . . .
“Good Buy” to All That: Pip Adam’s The New Animals
It’s imaginative fiction in a way that is jolting to the auto-fiction that is so prevalent today, and it allows Adam to make commentary on the disasters of human ambition.
Letter to My Mentee (October 26, 2023)
“This,” I say to my daughter, choking up, “is civilization. Not banking, not technology. Not weaponry that kills without a fight. This,” I go on, seeing her face pale, “is what it means to be civilized.”