Essays
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Gone
His arm jerked. Every time I spoke, it happened. I wanted it to stop. I didn’t want it to stop. I kept looking up. I didn’t feel my son’s presence in his body anymore, but his body was all I…
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RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: HYSTERIA REBOOT BY ELISSA BASSIST
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club’s September selection, Hysterical by Elissa Bassist
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The Lucky Ones
I live my life through the twin tenets of curiosity and close observation. I believe imagination and storytelling are central to our survival as a species—and yet, it’s my imagination that makes me jumpy.
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RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT BY Sarah Thankam Mathews
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club’s August selection, ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT by Sarah Thankam Mathews
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Voice On Addiction: Another Thing to Chase
She’s still somehow always thirsty . . . At least none of these drinks will kill her, even if the hunt for mood and mind-altering, for distraction, for something out there to help, may follow her to the grave.
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Fat Ghost
Only now can I finally see how this had been our pact all along. We’d decided between us, somewhere along the way, and without any real discussion, that my mother would be the flower and I would be the wax…
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RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: Wonderlands by Charles Baxter
This, I think, is one definition of sanity—the ability to keep things in perspective.
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The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective
“I was glad at least to have heard it.”
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From the Archive: Rivers of Babylon: The Story of a Third-Trimester Abortion
. . . I desperately, beyond reason, wanted an intact body for burial. I wanted it viscerally, animally, the way your body wakes up in the night looking for a newborn, the way you feel a physical connection to your…
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From the Archive: Explicit Violence
Afterward, there was dead silence in the kitchen. I know because I held my breath. Even air molecules seemed to still.
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Where You Want to Be
Art is never just art, and whiteness’ vision of the world doesn’t include me in it.
