Recent posts
Rumpus Articles
-
“Wide-Leg Poems”: A Conversation with Cynthia Manick
Emotions don’t change, we all know love and joy. We all know pain. We all know “trying to find love.”
-
A Mortal Education: Bernardo Zannoni’s My Stupid Intentions
In one of Solomon’s early lessons, he pushes Archy toward thoughts of his own mortality for the first time before offering religion as a solution to existential dread.
-
Rumpus Original Fiction: Get Gone
Every customer with perfect lipstick and a hard-lined face reminded me of Mom. We hadn’t spoken in nearly a year.
-
“Speculative Fiction as a Survival Tool:” A Conversation with C Pam Zhang
Failure is an inevitable part of the process. The faster you get through your failure, the faster you’ll get to the end.
-
Ghosts in the Mirror
My adoptive mother tells me I was precocious enough as a toddler to ask if I came from her belly. She says this was a sign I comprehended my adoption so early she never had to explain it to me.
-
The Antihero: A Conversation with Kim Foster
I had to change the parameters of what I thought success was. Success might be a plate of eggs with toast or a talk on the curb. Sometimes the most simple thing is the thing that makes the difference. I
-
Voices on Addiction: I’m Not Eating
I want to tell her that starving softens the edges of everything. When I’m not eating, only the moment at the end makes me feel present.
-
Debtors to a Mercy We Never Begged For
No, home is not as simple as the heart-shaped sandwiches Ma placed into my lunch bag on Valentine’s Day or the way my father confessed to listening to me sing shower showtunes or washing a car beside my brother as…
-
The Rumpus 2023 Gift Guide
Okay, a quick confession—I’m terrible at gifting. I occasionally land on the mark, but most of the time my ideas are either wild guesses or something thrown together in a panic, and I often fall back on the classics .…
-
“Good Buy” to All That: Pip Adam’s The New Animals
It’s imaginative fiction in a way that is jolting to the auto-fiction that is so prevalent today, and it allows Adam to make commentary on the disasters of human ambition.
-
Letter to My Mentee (October 26, 2023)
“This,” I say to my daughter, choking up, “is civilization. Not banking, not technology. Not weaponry that kills without a fight. This,” I go on, seeing her face pale, “is what it means to be civilized.”
-
No Quiet Endings: A Conversation with Elisa Gonzalez
I do think that a stranger’s vantage point can be valuable and create interesting reflections or ideas, but it feels important to doing that in a way that was ethical.