Essays
176 posts
RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: HYSTERIA REBOOT BY ELISSA BASSIST
An excerpt from The Rumpus Book Club's September selection, Hysterical by Elissa Bassist
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.
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
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.
RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: Wonderlands by Charles Baxter
This, I think, is one definition of sanity—the ability to keep things in perspective.
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.