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  • Are You a Trans Ally?

    Often well-intentioned cis folks like myself feel kind of overwhelmed by all there is to know and, not wanting to sound ignorant or hurtful, just kind of keep to the sidelines. But it doesn’t take a degree in gender studies to be a trans ally (nor does it require you to have an LGBTQ friend).…

  • Albums of Our Lives: The Mountain Goats’s The Sunset Tree

    Albums of Our Lives: The Mountain Goats’s The Sunset Tree

    I knew if I could make it out of town, make it to college, I would survive. But I wasn’t sure I would.

  • The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Story of My Fear Over Time

    The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Story of My Fear Over Time

    A boy dies at exactly my age, one month past ten years old. We share a birthday, same day, same year.

  • The Ways We Speak

    The Ways We Speak

    We suffer, after all, not because of the ways we speak, but because of the ways we exclude ourselves with internalized external narratives about how different we feel from others.

  • Seven Almonds

    Seven Almonds

    The first thing my parents bought when they earned money in America was a giant bag of almonds as a talisman for success.

  • The Rumpus Interview with David Shields and Caleb Powell

    The Rumpus Interview with David Shields and Caleb Powell

    Writers David Shields and Caleb Powell can’t stop fighting, even about their new book-length argument and forthcoming film, I Think You’re Totally Wrong.

  • The Loneliest Whale In The Ocean

    Somewhere in the Pacific ocean, a whale of unprecedented size is swimming around and calling out to other whales, with no response. This is the “52 Blue” whale, subject of worldwide devotion and fascination and a beautiful new essay on being alone from Leslie Jamison. You can (and should!) read an excerpt on Slate. One marine-mammal…

  • Missed Connection: White Teeth

    Scenario: you are on the train, you are sitting across from a man in a baseball cap reading, say, White Teeth, and in a matter of seconds you’ve visualized an entire literary life with him (the next stop, he gets off, and that future crumbles). If this sounds familiar, or if you’re just a sucker…

  • The Last Laugh

    Memoirist (and former editor-at-large of McSweeney’s) Sean Wilsey talks to The Atlantic about his essay collection, More Curious, and why humor writing resonates: I think there’s something dishonest about writing that isn’t funny. I can’t engage with a piece of work without an element of humor to it. Laughter and levity are important aspects of human life, even at its darkest,…

  • Rereading James Baldwin

    Teju Cole has a long, staggeringly (good, sharp, dynamic, crushing) essay in The New Yorker about rereading James Baldwin’s Stranger In The Village: American racism has many moving parts, and has had enough centuries in which to evolve an impressive camouflage. It can hoard its malice in great stillness for a long time, all the while pretending…

  • Working in A Public Space (of sorts)

    The CLMP blog interviews the staff of literary magazine, A Public Space, for a nice, succinct take on what it’s like to be a contemporary lit editor.  Contains: public confusion on the term “a public space”, answers to the age-old “is social media destroying everything?” question, and alternate career aspirations of the staff.

  • The Bookstores Will Survive

    A bright spot in the midst of all the back-and-forth in the Amazon battle—Kate Brittain, at The Morning News, writes about the state of independent bookstores: I began my search in a nervous mood. But as I entered name after name into the database, wandering virtually into every store I could discover between our shining seas, I…