Rumpus Original
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Cost of Intimacy
Chasing intimacy can feel cheap—and yet intimacy we pay for can be meaningful. I find traditional therapy as awkward as sex, exposing my emotional self like I expose my body.
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What to Read When the President Decides It’s “Time to Exit Paris”
Turn off the television and pick up a book. You’ll feel better for it, we promise.
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You Can’t Be a Snob with Bad Teeth: Talking with David Sedaris
David Sedaris discusses his new collection of diary entries, Theft By Finding, his love for book signings, and his inevitable return to IHOP.
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Songs of Our Lives: Paul Simon’s “Me and Julio Down by the Schoolyard”
There’s you and him, and you and me. You seem to want each of us all to yourself, and that’s fine; you’re the one we both care about.
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Mixed Feelings: Why Do Men Always Want to Settle Down?
Many women do want to get married, and that’s a perfectly reasonable choice. The problem, then, is that when a woman says she doesn’t want to marry, many people find this hard to believe.
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Digging for Characters: A Conversation with Sonya Chung
Sonya Chung discusses her latest novel The Loved Ones, the mental space required to wander around fictional worlds, and looking back at her childhood.
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Reflections of the World and Me
At eight years old I stared in the mirror and willed myself to believe I was normal. I wasn’t.
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Multitudes:
(Re)Writing MotherI like to listen to my mother’s voice; the sounds she makes in an English-Korean mashup; we are each the other’s dictionary.
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Finding Shelter
A hurricane is coming. Rita is in the Gulf of Mexico and is approaching Houston at a slow but steady pace of nine miles an hour. I don’t have many, or any, illusions that God and Jesus will see us…
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The Story Is the Concepts: Philosophizing with Ryan Ruby
Ryan Ruby talks about his debut novel The Zero and the One, the challenges of pacing and plot, and the fun of inventing a book of philosophy for the novel.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Hello
All those prank calls were partly a way of taking control of the unknown, the ambiguity of that space between “hello” and whatever comes next.
