Twenty-five Years Unbound: Reading a Book of AIDS
The range of prepositions used here in writing about how to write AIDS is indicative of the range of questions encompassed by the book, the range of the “brutal presence” of the disease.
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Rumpus Articles
Inherent Violence: A Conversation with Rita Chang-Eppig
I knew I wanted to be deliberately vague, as to whether something was actually happening. For many people across the world and across time periods, there isn’t always this strong delineation between fantasy and reality.
Animal Rescue
The morning I found Gaspard and Vincent, I had just visited the punk house where the ex boyfriend had been staying. He had some things of mine that I couldn’t let him keep . . .
On abandoning words: Carlos Fonseca’s Austral
Hidden within all these constellations and labyrinths of philosophy is a love story and a story about the struggle of a writer to find meaning in words.
From the Archives: Rumpus Original Fiction: The Anniversary
There lay her gift, basking in the sunlight. A gray-green lizard the size of a shoe. It stood so still she thought it was fake.
The World is a Shitting Bird: A Conversation with Emilie Moorhouse
She mocked beauty standards and even the condescending tone they had when advising women on how to behave “nicely.” So she obviously did have certain strong leanings.
The Presence in Absences: A Conversation with Gina Chung
The only way you can care for your art is to care for yourself.
Voices on Addiction: Anchor Point
At first, sobriety feels at once like a death of a best friend, loss of comfort, and a beloved version of one’s self. On some level, it is exactly these things . . .
Killing One to Save Many: Javier Marías’s Tomás Nevinson
Marías is one of those gifted writers whose style sets him apart from other writers, whose authorship is apparent on every page he writes.
Rumpus Original Fiction: Fantasyland
Here is a lesson Portia learned years ago—you can get away with being rude and nasty if there’s a twinkle in your eye.
“Actually, I’m Not Grateful”: A Conversation with Stephanie Foo
I found myself as a potential representative of a larger group, which had no representative. There wasn’t a first-person story about Complex Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, so I thought, “I know how to do this.”
Speaking to Men at Parties
There are moments when the light passes just right over the high point of someone’s cheekbone and I imagine my whole life as it would have been in a different universe, tracing the events of this imaginary life from that spot on their face to my death.