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Rumpus Articles
February Spotlight: Letters in the Mail
Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail programs.
A Kind of Common Madness: A Conversation with Liz Harmer
Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession.
Finding Freedom in the Absurd: Jesse Ball’s Autoportrait
From Ball’s absurdist perspective, leaning into the world’s inherent purposelessness isn’t about embracing mortality. It’s about embracing complete obliteration.
From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: Emergency Lifeboats: 24 (12 on Each Side)
“What’s a six-letter word for ignoring truth,” she might say, without looking up from the puzzle.
A Conversation with Daisuke Shen and Vi Khi Nao About their Collaborative Novella, Funeral
Writing started feeling interesting again, like it was worth it after all, and not just a boring thing that ate ham sandwiches on white bread for every meal and whose favorite book from last year was [Redacted] by [Famous author], which remained on the NYT Bestsellers List for what felt like forever.
Inventing the Form of Yourself: A conversation with Maggie Millner
I have great affection for writers who come into their queerness after they’ve already written books . . .
ENOUGH: Three Poems
"Not all Men" / Except for the one that followed / Me down every Publix aisle, / To the bakery, to the register, / & waited for me in the lot.
Rumpus Original Poetry: Two Poems by Janan Alexandra
2. In literary Arabic, kaph is used as a prefix to mean like or as or as though / 3. If kaph is a hand that means like or as or as though, then kaph is a simile / 4. Simile is a hand touching two places at once, a hand bringing together / two far away things, making a transfer (metaphor)
Another Oracle: Lynn Xu’s Those Ashen Heaps That Cantilevered Vase of Light
Almost ten years have passed since Lynn Xu’s debut, the luminous Debts & Lessons, introduced us to her oracle. “Let it not be for what you write, the world /…