Essays
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RUMPUS BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: Wonderlands by Charles Baxter
This, I think, is one definition of sanity—the ability to keep things in perspective.
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The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective
“I was glad at least to have heard it.”
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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…
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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.
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Where You Want to Be
Art is never just art, and whiteness’ vision of the world doesn’t include me in it.
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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.”
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A Disassembled Room
It certainly wasn’t part of my grand plan to keep an ashtray full of cigarette butts for eternity.
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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.
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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.
