An Open Letter in Lieu of a Review: on Still Life by Jay Hopler
. . . there’s some vital aspect to a person even the approach of oblivion can’t erase.
Rumpus Original
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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.
The Last Book of Poems I Loved: Louise Glück’s Winter Recipes from the Collective
"I was glad at least to have heard it."
Swallowing the Darkness: Gag Reflex by Elle Nash
““i’m soft-skinned but my bones have hardened calcium deposited cartilage, the fat around my heart lithified with the carnage of constrictors around tiny mice ribs, squeezed till it removes the soft mealy insides. sucked out by standards i will never reach. by these industry snakes."
Rumpus Original Fiction: Shadow Catchers
One month after receiving the doctor’s revised prognosis, Zina attended her father’s funeral. The next day, she boarded a minibus back home, a satchel of herbs for her special teas stashed in her bag. She resumed her position as the second child, confident that things would be different. / She knew now how to shift the world in her favor.
What to Read When You’d Rather be in Australia
Featuring an "erotic lesbian crime thriller," because we need that in our lives right now.
RUMPUS POETRY BOOK CLUB EXCERPT: “42” by Aldo Amparán
An excerpt from The Rumpus Poetry Book Club's August selection
Enough: Incandescent
I can see your mouth moving, a monologue of mock misery meant to quiet me, accelerating your tears for your finishing act. But all I hear is the roar of my own voice, the unholy screech, the gravel of my throat grinding against itself, finding its traction.
From the Archive: Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Poems by Eve L. Ewing
They look / for a lash that isn’t there, even them that never felt it. / It’s in their shoulders. / The lash lives in their shoulders.
We Live in a Speculative Fiction Novel Right Now: A Conversation with Andrew DeYoung
Rather than work being a place to follow your dream, or make a difference, it’s the place you work because you have to figure out a way to pay your rent.
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.
This Is What We Have Inherited: A Conversation with Siphiwe Gloria Ndlovu
I think it is imperative to explore the limits of the colonial narrative and its dictates because, whether we like it or not, the world that we have inherited was created by that narrative. If we have any hope of moving past it, we have to understand it fully.