Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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White Tongue
It was senior year of high school, and a statistics study session slowly devolved into a friend and I commiserating about the shortcomings of Duolingo: there was no Tagalog course for English learners. She was the only Filipino person I…
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Traversing the Bridge to Dystopia: A Conversation with Nini Berndt
Something changed substantially during COVID. Housing skyrocketed. Our unhoused population skyrocketed. The opiate crisis was in full display. My wife and our son and I were living in an un-air-conditioned apartment in Cap Hill and marching in the George Floyd…
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An Excerpt from “First Time, Long Time”
He was more handsome in person, somewhere in the shallow end of his sixties, wearing a soft-looking black sweater and smelling of expensive soap. I could picture the place where the soap was purchased: one of those quiet, ritzy stores…
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I Thought America Was the Thief: Mastery and Assimilation in Esther Lin’s “Cold Thief Place”
Lately, in my social media feed, I’ve seen a James Baldwin quote surface between news stories and advertisements: “You read something which you thought only happened to you, and you discover that it happened 100 years ago to Dostoyevsky. This…
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The First Book: Tennessee Hill
The process of querying agents was filled with no’s that, though sad, each felt like a gentle push in the right direction towards my eventual agent Elizabeth Pratt. Once Elizabeth and I teamed up, everything happened rapidly. She did so…
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Rocket Drive
This is the first time I’ve witnessed a person borrow food. There are many firsts in drug addiction.
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Cycles and Stasis: On Nanae Aoyama’s A Perfect Day to Be Alone
A Perfect Day to Be Alone follows Chizu, a 20-year-old trying to make a living in her hometown by working a series of part-time jobs. When her single mother leaves Japan for a yearlong fellowship in China, Chizu moves to…
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In Search of Light
Jacob and I drive up into the rocky plateau surrounding town, then wander further along the highway until the lights of homes vanish. Still unfamiliar with the geography of the town, we’re unsure where to spot the aurora.
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Coming Out of Her Shell: A Conversation with Anelise Chen
Gregor Samsa went to bed a tired, overworked salesman and woke up as a giant cockroach. Anelise Chen’s own metamorphosis was nowhere near as drastic. Clam Down: A Metamorphosis (One World, 2025) is Chen’s exploration of what it would mean…
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Ultimately Unbounded: A conversation with Alina Ștefănescu
Mystic-heretic-philosopher-poet Alina Ștefănescu’s newest collection of poetry, My Heresies (Sarabande 2025) is a radiant skirmish of families and selfhood, countries and allegiances, rules and refusals, and the force with which fraught love (is there any other kind?) bends us to…
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Orientation
At the time, though, I couldn’t make much sense of anything. So I accepted everything with the detached nonchalance of a guy who has no idea what’s going on.
