David Peak: The Last Book I Loved, Birch Hills at World’s End
Every high school has a kid like Erik. He’s sharp, dark, and charming. Add in the fact that he has his own car and impeccable taste in Scandinavian metal, and who better…
Features & Reviews
9301 posts
The Last Repatriate by Mathew Salesses
There’s an inherent need to stitch together a war veteran’s memory because narratives made of memories are otherwise fragmented. This is the tragedy of a war story—that the wholeness will…
The Rumpus Interview with Chloe Caldwell
I first saw Chloe Caldwell do her thing a year ago. She read an essay about an orgy she’d participated in and how much she’d enjoyed the orgy, and the…
The Rumpus Interview with Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel is a living legend (and I say this from the point of view of a queerish autobio cartoonist).
Love, An Index, by Rebecca Lindenberg
Love, An Index tells a beautiful and heartbreaking story, and at the heart of it is some of the most original and interesting poetry that I’ve come across in a…
Us by Michael Kimball
A beautiful wrought novel now re-released, Michael Kimball’s Us tells the story of death from three divergent angles.
Adam Parker Cogbill: The Last Book I Loved, Abbott Awaits
I am as guilty as any other reader I know of opening or hijacking conversations with some derivation of, “You know what you should read?” I can’t help myself; I…
The Rumpus Interview with Inga Muscio
Inga Muscio is the highly acclaimed, and equally controversial (and unapologetic) feminist author of Cunt: A Declaration of Independence, Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil: My Life and Times in a…
The Listeners, By Leni Zumas
Reading Leni Zumas’s debut novel The Listeners puts one in mind of the Boston Molasses Disaster of 1919. Not because the novel is messy—it isn’t—but because it contains the same…
Plume, by Kathleen Flenniken
Newly appointed Washington State Poet Laureate, Kathleen Flenniken, recently released a second book called Plume, part of the Pacific Northwest Poetry Series of University of Washington Press. I will admit,…
Vanishing-Line, by Jeffrey Yang
In Vanishing-Line, Jeffrey Yang writes, “But the birches of Yennecott/ recall his word-spirits.” Rather than using lines or stanzas as the basic unit of expression in this collection, Yang writes…
The Last Book I Loved: The Cat’s Table
For years when I was young I would crouch beneath the dinner table to watch my parents drink after-dinner coffee and wine with an ever-changing group of scientists—a tall man…