Rumpus Originals
9690 posts
The Whole Vortex of Home
[Peter] Gizzi’s particular gift is to posit that shifting location where senses meet the terrible and the sublime, where political portent or its brittle actualities announce themselves in various configurations.
DEAR SUGAR, The Rumpus Advice Column #97: You Have Arrived at the Fire
You have arrived at the fire. Here’s the bread. Grab a hunk.
Before and After
Sitting on the edge of the English language, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s new collection Apricot Jam and Other Stories pushes us into twentieth century Russia.
Habeas Whitney
The one that got me was a torso shot. There were a bunch of them published even before she died, frantic paparazzi pictures of Whitney Houston leaving last night’s party.
The Dress Doesn’t Make the Priest
I am going to tell you my favorite story of how a flower acquired its name. It’s the story of the ranunculus.
They All Stand Up and Sing
I was somewhere in a big room in an old apartment in New York. The room was in a brownstone, or limestone, and had what appeared to be twenty-foot-high ceilings.…
We’ll Call Them Contact Zones
Based in research of museum design, and memorialization, Slot’s narrator moves inside public landmarks dedicated to various disasters—9/11, slavery, Hiroshima, the Holocaust— and explores ways memorialization acts on conscience and…
A Narrow Slice of Things
These cactus are so phallic. This is what I say to Andrew in the early moments of what will spread into an entire February day spent wringing the narrow backroads…