The Promise of Werfel’s Musa Dagh: Portraying Genocide in Fiction
How does a fictional account come to stand in for history?
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Film
Mama’s Fancy Stripper Heels: Working Mothers Dish
[A] person’s labor is not indicative of their parenting.
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Masculinity and Fatal Desire in The Skin I Live In
Why, in art of all things, should we ignore the intuition of the body?
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When Michel Legrand Dies
I sing it to feel the darkness of it. I demand access.
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The Supplicant Undertaker
Is it too much to ask: a girl to want her father to keep his feet firmly in the soil of the living?
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Toil and Trouble
Feet dangle in the foreground, suspended in space by distance and gravity.
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Sally Wen Mao
Sally Wen Mao discusses her new collection, OCULUS.
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The Thread: Outside the Gaze
This is the story I needed as a young girl; this is the story we all need.
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The Queer Syllabus: Velvet Goldmine by Todd Haynes
In The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.
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Sweet Bird
Every story needs to begin in a place of stasis, a comfortable zero.
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The Queer Syllabus: Chavela by Catherine Gund and Daresha Kyi
In The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.
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The Queer Syllabus: The Watermelon Woman by Cheryl Dunye
In The Queer Syllabus, writers nominate works for a new canon of queer literature.
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Watching Roots in the Age of Trump
…slavery isn’t African-American history, it’s American history.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #146: Andrew Solomon
“I can tell my story with precautions; others strip away my armor and expose a beating heart.”
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Falling in Love with Eve Harrington
Power structures are not static conditions—they cannot be built to last permanently and disruptions by young ambitious outsiders are inevitable.
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Hannibal Lecter, My Therapist
In the dark, I felt at home in the underground bunker where the hospital stored its violent men.
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You Like That, Baby?: The Myth of Feminine Mystery
“It’s like a damn Rubik’s cube down there!”
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Black Panther and Strong Women
I saw myself on the big screen—the strong black woman that I am, and the stronger black woman I aspire to become.
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Look at How the Bullets Have Missed
I praise everyone I can still touch, their warmth a violent protest against the cold weapons of death.
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The Girl Next Door: Pot Docs and Loss on the California Coast
[A]s with any documentary, every one of our stories eventually becomes a ghost story. On a long enough timeline, that is.
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The Thread: Look What You Made Me Do
Can a person with some agency ever claim victimization, or are agency and victimhood a binary?
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Living Proof: A Review of Wild Wild Country
The story of Rajneeshpuram is told in a series of events and everything within it is true. But it is not real. It does not come alive.
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Strong Island’s Horizon
Whose lives are visible? Whose pain is just? Whose grief is vocal? Such inquiry is not rhetorical.
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The Neoliberal Heart of the 90s Romcom
The personal is political, to the extent that politics itself can be effectively effaced with no detrimental effects.
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Thinking about the Story: A Conversation with Kareem Mortimer
Filmmaker Kareem Mortimer discusses his latest feature, Cargo, his writing process, and why the Bahamas can be “a microcosm for the world.”
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview #118: John Ridley
“It was about showing people taking, or denying, responsibility.”
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The Real Fake News
In 2017, newscaster cameos may be the only fact-fiction crossovers for which people have no difficulty keeping the two concepts apart.
...moreAn Open Letter to George Bailey
“That’s right: George Bailey needs to chill. Don’t @ me.”
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Titanic Turns Twenty in a World That Won’t Talk About It
After twenty years and eleven Oscars and eleventy billion dollars, we still don’t really talk about Titanic.
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You Still Got It: Bar-Hopping with Burt Young
Actor and painter Burt Young talks filmmaking, art, and the years he spent living on a sixty-three-foot yacht.
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