Features & Reviews Archives - The Rumpus

The First Book

The First Book: Daniel Tam-Claiborne

I began writing Transplants in earnest in 2019 during the last semester of my MFA program. I had the truly great fortune of working with Lauren Groff who, when given the option between helping me touch up my existing short stories for my graduate thesis or advising me on a new project nearly entirely from scratch, wisely nudged me toward the latter.

A Space of Her Own

Marcia LeBeau’s debut collection, A Curious Hunger, is a powerful testament to the unabashed wholeness of womanhood—and an assertion that our culture, where power skews cis male, needs to make…

Interviews

Take A Risk and Stand at The Edge of a Cliff: A Conversation with Jen Michalski

In her newest novel, All This Can Be True (Keylight Books, 2025), Michalski makes readers want to break out the black eyeliner and catch a show headlining (the excellently named) Clit Girls.

Graphic art featuring the words The Rumpus Prize

The Rumpus Prize in Poetry, First Place: Georgio Russell

"Ode to the Black Man Nod"

Reviews

Misperceptions, Assumptions, and Slurs: Jackie Domenus’s No Offense

Even when doing the work to figure ourselves out, even within the seemingly safest of spaces, we must grapple with how others contain and label us.

Interviews

Chaos Seeps Into Order: A Conversation with Maria Reva

If you can laugh about a difficult situation, laugh in your aggressor’s face, it gives you a sense of power.

Reviews

A Summertime Swoon Tash Aw’s The South

The relationship helps Jay achieve a sense of selfhood that promises to outlast the usual parameters of a summer romance. In a sense, he’s coming out to himself.

Interviews

Despair is a Luxury, but Hope is a Discipline: A Conversation with Robert Macfarlane

Despair is a luxury, but hope is a discipline.

Contrast, Rumination, and Metamorphosis: Diannely Antigua’s Good Monster

As in her debut, Antigua heads off any feelings of confessional monotony by mixing her diary poems with an elegant variety of lesser confessional, more expositional poems.

Reviews

Why a Happy Ending Matters: A Review of John Vercher’s Novels

To appreciate John Vercher’s complete oeuvre of fiction, we have to appreciate what has remained throughout his work and what has shifted.

Interviews

I Needed Love Poems For Myself: A Conversation with Rob Macaisa Colgate

I’m curious about a world in which people are less bothered by the physical confrontation of mental disability, and that felt important when I was writing this book to have mental disability take up physical space in the poems and the pages.

The First Book

The First Book: Veena Dinavahi

Make your own meaning. It sounds cliché, but I’ve come to accept it as a survival skill.

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