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Rumpus Articles
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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 hard work disappear into the maw of our short attention…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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…
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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…
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.

