The Most-Read Essays of 2022
Essays are all about reflection, and we thought we’d kick off 2023 with a look at the most-read pieces of last year. It can sometimes feel like hours (years) of…
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Rumpus Articles
What Is a Person?: Lydia Conklin’s Rainbow Rainbow
Safety requires setting up clear boundaries, but a restricted life is lonely and isolating and often impossible to bear.
From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: Three Flash Fictions by Niyah Morris
The lasso was a gaping mouth that opened wide enough, we hoped, to swallow the cloud.
Pinning myself like a butterfly onto the page: A Conversation with Kimberly Nguyen
I imagined myself as a lone satellite floating in outer space trying to reach earth.
Voices on Addiction: There is No Escape
. . .this house is not the right place for children either and yet, here you are day after day.
The Sense of Words: Reverse Engineer by Kate Colby
. . . language is duplicitous. To be broken is perhaps to be part of a process (or a metaphor for life), where to bend (and survive) also leads to being broken. In this context, the word “broken” in “Reverse Engineer” might well point to a hard-won success.
Telling our necessary truths: A Conversation with Janet Rodriguez
Only after this memoir was I able to see the Kafka truth: We are telling our necessary truths. We are the necessary heroes of our own narratives. Somewhere inside all of it, there is a collective truth, one we can safely tell.
From the Archive: The Saturday Rumpus Essay: DNA
Of course, maybe dividing the world into two kinds of people is just another way of making sure there is a crack in everything. When can you smooth out this fault line?
The Story and the Truth: Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation
. . . a scathing, satirical campus novel about academia, orientalism, the Western commodification of Asian cultures, and the lengths to which institutions will go to protect their reputations and their darlings.
From the Archive: Rumpus Original Fiction: No Good
The sounds that she would expect here are entirely absent. There are no cries, no weeping. Just soothing, muffled tones.
We’re more powerful if we’re not so embroiled in illusion: A Conversation with Irene Silt
Love is just extremely terrifying and kind of abysmal.