From the Archive: Sketch Book Reviews: Girlhood by Melissa Febos
An illustrated review of Melissa Febos’s new essay collection, GIRLHOOD!
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Features & Reviews
Make the Story Work, and the Politics Will Look After Itself: The Rumpus Interview with Tony Birch
It is easy to be awed by Tony Birch’s prolific body of work—his dynamic career ranging from firefighter to professor—his deep love of family and heritage, and his humility. He is a historian and climate change activist who outwardly observes the devastating consequences of colonialism, yet also writes from within his experiences as an Aboriginal […]
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To Become A Kind Person Who Also Writes Books: Body Work by Melissa Febos
The ethics of Body Work are not necessarily that we writers and lovers must achieve perfect consistency between our behaviors (shopping at Sephora) and our politics (beauty standards are harmful), or between our desires (to be rewarded, both intangibly and commercially, for our adherence to dominant culture) and our values (to resist that dominance).
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I Write to Make Myself Unrecognized: A Conversation with Shangyang Fang
In Buddhism, there is always an expression on this and that, and the yes and no of this and that. For example, the other side of the river is a metaphor of death, in contrast to this life, this side. I hope that poetry is a way to shatter the border.
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What To Read When You’ve Accumulated Too Much
A reading list for spring and spring cleaning!
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The Community Aspect of Poetry: A Conversation with H. Melt
I think poetry lends itself to community and getting to know people intimately. Poetry requires vulnerability.
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At the Crossing Between Words: Migrant Psalms by Darrel Alejandro Holnes
The actor stares the audience in the eye—shattering the fourth wall, and we’re implored to see better. Holnes challenges us to view our realities as multifaceted and dynamic—there are no neat boxes, no easy definitions.
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Apocalypse Yesterday: Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes
The Membranes is a climate novel not because it contends with catastrophe, but because it shows that everydayness has a way of proceeding alongside disaster.
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Reading Fiction As an Act of Resistance: A Conversation with Azar Nafisi
We need fiction because fiction does not polarize. Fiction is based on understanding over judgment.
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Rumpus Book Club Excerpt: Animal Bodies by Suzanne Roberts
An excerpt from Suzanne Roberts’ Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, & Other Difficulties forthcoming from Nebraska Press, March 2022
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Catalyst Events and a Time for Poetry: An Interview with Charles Flowers
Consider: My coming out story has been told, but coming out is constantly changing and shifting and needs retelling, and each telling has value for a particular audience.
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A Dreamscape of Longing: Two Big Differences by Ian Ross Singleton
Zina’s observations of her time in Detroit crystallize both a feeling of otherness and a wry critique of the young American activists who celebrated socialist ideas without fully appreciating the legacy of Soviet rule in Ukraine.
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How Wonderful It Is to Be So Moved: A Conversation with Sarah Krasnostein
The most truthful we can be in a factual genre is to doubt the attainability of fact at all.
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What to Read When You Want to Be a Bad Girl
Ariel Delgado Dixon, author of DON’T SAY WE DIDN’T WARN YOU, shares a reading list for when you want to be a Bad Girl.
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Using Form to Transform: Come Clean by Joshua Nguyen
If I had a dollar for every word I have written about BIPOC representation in entertainment media, I still wouldn’t have enough to pay back my student loans and car loans.
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Cigarettes and Wittgenstein: The Rumpus Interview with Sean Thor Conroe
The [novel’s] main question would be, How does a man stuck in resentment and anger at others and the world, who lacks a sense of belonging and sense of his usefulness in the world, find his way out of that?
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The Everyday Practice of Art:The Loft Generation by Edith Schloss
Her writing is quiet, perhaps even naive. But Schloss is enamored by the minutiae of her subjects, and the exactness and delicacy of her details ripple out like water. Trying to focus on one aspect of the book would be to let the entire thing go.
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Joy in Persistence: Siri Hustvedt on Writing and the Need for Adaptive Grandiosity
Everyone, even the most tell-all writer, withholds something in the interests of protecting herself or others, but my interest in my own stories has always been to use them to illustrate larger stories about the culture . . .
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Eva Jurczyk
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Eva Jurczyk about her debut novel, Department of Rare Books & Special Collections (Poisoned Pen Press, January 2022), and its structure, art capers, and more. This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. To join the Rumpus Book Club, click here. Upcoming authors include Suzanne Roberts, Laura Stanfill, Yuvi […]
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Your Job is to Tell the Truth: A Conversation with Edgar Gomez about High-Risk Homosexual
…if I’m going to acknowledge my fear, finding something about it that’s funny helps it go down easier. That’s how I survive.
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In Praise of Young Little Luxuries: Rax King’s Tacky
Her enthusiasm . . . leaves you a little raw, thinking about the things in your own adolescence you could have enjoyed more if you hadn’t learned so early the most ironic ways to protect your heart . . .
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A Devotee of the Interconnectedness of Time: A Conversation with Ariel Delgado Dixon
“When I teach, my biggest hobby horse is specificity . . . Even boring people are specifically boring.”
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What to Read When Celebrating Black History
Rumpus editors share a list of books to celebrate Black History Month!
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Hope is the Best Strategy: A Conversation with Sharman Apt Russell
As we start seeing the effects of climate change, of people struggling with drought and struggling with erratic weather patterns and flooding, we have to accept our responsibility.
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A Gentle Touch: Annie Hartnett’s Unlikely Animals
What’s special about Hartnett’s chorus of the dead, though, is that they stress the tension between overlapping realities.
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Revelation is Absurd: A Conversation with Adrian Nathan West
…we live in a culture that’s at once euphemistic and profoundly hyperbolic, where people try as hard as possible to not actually be saying anything so that they can never be accused of holding any position. Whereas it’s important to me, to talk about what people really do, what they really feel.
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The Woman in My Head: A Conversation with Emily Maloney
There’s a lot of rules or feelings about how writing a book should be, but very little of that actually corresponds with reality.
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What It Means to be Human: Natashia Deón’s The Perishing
A review of THE PERISHING: “[H]ope keeps you in the ring, pushing off the ropes. Hope keeps you in the fight.”
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Letter to a Poet: Matthew Olzmann on Writing Humor & Befriending Whales
Matthew Olzmann: [S]uddenly the poem becomes this meditation on mortality, but at no point do you think, “Oh my gosh, Yusef, why is he talking to a maggot or how does he know this maggot? Or what kind of relationship do they have?”
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Celebrate Everything: A Conversation with Kim Fu
An interview with Kim Fu about writing the collection Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century.
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