RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: Wonderlands by Charles Baxter
This, I think, is one definition of sanity—the ability to keep things in perspective.
Essays
168 posts
The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective
"I was glad at least to have heard it."
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 children even when you cannot see them, the way you want something when everything else has been taken from you. It is the same reason I buried him; I wanted to know where he had gone from me and how.
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.
Where You Want to Be
Art is never just art, and whiteness’ vision of the world doesn’t include me in it.
From the Archive: What Burns in the Pit
“Things can catch fire even when they let each other go. But we don’t give up. We don’t stop loving them.”
A Disassembled Room
It certainly wasn’t part of my grand plan to keep an ashtray full of cigarette butts for eternity.
The Dark Mothers’ Club
I know all the hours intimately as any lover, the lucid high of four a.m. as familiar as the adrenaline drunk of noon.
From the Archive: The Saturday Rumpus Essay: I Left My Heart in Taos
You might gasp. You might gasp and your heart slips out. You whisper and let red willows drift toward the river.