Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
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I Had to Make it Mean Something: A Conversation with John Cotter
. . . the process of writing really was a devotion. It gave me a reason to keep going. And because I’m interested in formal problems, it was the crafting of sentences, finding rhythms, shaping my material that helped me…
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Voices on Addiction: Where the Heart Is
I read in the kitchen after dinner, after the dishes were washed and put away and everyone crowded into the living room to watch the Twilight Zone or Bonanza. There was a light over the table, and I’d dissolve into…
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When the Underworld Comes Knocking: Colson Whitehead’s Crook Manifesto
“You were a cop and then a robber and a cop again,” recalls Officer Munson. And on this fateful night, he wants Carney to play again, this time with deadly stakes.
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The Price of Power, Cannibalism, and Transmutation: A Conversation with Shanta Lee Gander
While I do see there is importance in recognizing identity, I also want there to be a broader field to go beyond the identity itself, the identities that were forced upon us, in addition to what we continue to reinforce…
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September Spotlight: Letters in the Mail
Our next Letters in the Mail come from author Mario Chard and Quinn Carver Johnson.
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Maybe Home is the Thing We Carry: A Conversation with Janika Oza
. . . This is a story of a family trying to find their place in a world that is constantly shifting beneath them, and I wanted them and their relationships and emotions and memories at the center of this…
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Nonbinary Thinking: Stephanie Burt’s We Are Mermaids
We’re reminded that the first creatures that crawled out of the ocean were fish that evolved to walk on land. What are we if not constantly evolving?
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The Trap of Domesticity: Mieko Kanai’s Mild Vertigo
Between a stream-of-consciousness-inspired prose, image patterns, and consistent pivots of thought, Kanai establishes the most surprising thing about this novel: its ability to make the vertiginous hypnotic.
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“A Mirror and a Window”: A Conversation with Jiordan Castle
I think the older we get, we change, but we still love what we love. We still have the same little shames and little happies and all these things that make us us from when we first started becoming whoever…
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What to Read When It’s Women in Translation Month
Women In Translation month has grown since inaugurated in 2013 into an organized global movement that includes translators from all backgrounds and genders.
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Writing the Emotional Stakes of the Mundane: A Conversation with Alexandra Chang
As a writer, I really like working with constraints and getting to play with different structures, voices, moods, and characters. The simple fact that short stories are short gives me all of that.
