In Ardent Defense of Intellect: Susan Sontag’s On Women
Sontag parses out how women were—and are—patronized, idolized, romanced, and discarded based on proximity to their perceived expiration date, whereas men age without the same discrimination.
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Rumpus Articles
Rumpus Original Fiction: Dream People
I am embarrassed by how it scares me, getting older. By how the fear has guided every decision. By the math I’m always doing in my head, working back from fifty-two. If I die at the same age my dad died, Brody will be twenty-six, which is old enough.
A Poem as a Shield and a Prayer: An Interview with Lyudmyla Khersonska
People want to have somebody helping them with the names of things, for someone may forget words during the war. A poem is like a shield and a prayer.
Balancing all the parts to the whole arc: A conversation with Cristina García
I feel like in my own experience and experience of many people I see, there is tremendous competition for narrative. For me, it’s interesting to see what pans out.
As with Vigor, As with Pain: A Review of How to Love Everyone and Almost Get Away with It
Egger’s sentences jump from one point to another, perhaps mirroring in her language how the speakers jump from one bed into another—the next temporary stop is wherever desire leads her to be.
The Cost of Belonging: Augusto Higa Oshiro’s The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu
In this vortex of language and culture, the translator’s task is all the more essential and Jennifer Shyue’s translation from Spanish is both precise and poetic. In addition to the music of the prose, Shyue does justice to the multiple vernacular at play, bringing two unlike cultures into the portrait of a single man.
“Being in Uncertainties”: A Conversation with Maureen N. McLane
A lot of poems want to place you in the darting mind of the poem. Some want to address you—as “the beloved,” say, or as someone hated, or they implicitly situate you as an overhearer of such an address. But poems can also be spaceships offering interstellar as well as time travel.
What to Read When Remembering Milan Kundera
Though I am often at least the typist behind many of the posts authored by The Rumpus, I am keeping my name on this one as it’s very much a…
Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Fady Joudah
The bees would not miss us if the entire neighborhood went missing. / The reverse isn’t true. The mind goes to self // as the self comes to mind. / The mind tells the self, I made you, / and the self asks, who gave you that idea?
Amnesia and Abject Terror Are Prerequisites: A Conversation With Ruth Madievsky
You don’t read literary fiction if you’re looking for tight little answers to life’s mysteries.
The Burden of Being Real: Nicole Flattery’s Nothing Special
To see oneself and one’s people as real: this is the only way out of the shadow of the special.