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What to Read When

277 posts

Themed reading recommendation lists from The Rumpus’s editorial staff and guest authors.

It All Felt Impossible cover
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You Want to Find Mystery in the Ordinary

  • Tom McAllister
  • May 23, 2025
...I find myself most excited about writing that is focused on the concrete facts of daily life.
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the original daughter cover
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You Can’t Catch a Break

  • Jemimah Wei
  • May 9, 2025
What reliably got me out of that slump was writing more and reading literature that lifted me out of my immediate crisis (I can’t go on!) and into the world (and yet we must!).
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Katy Family cover
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You’re Looking for Romance

  • Gemini Wahhaj
  • April 11, 2025
Throughout history, the marauding aristocracy has torn away people from their land and community, most recently in the formation of the modern industrial nation.
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True Believer
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You’re a True Believer

  • Jeff Kass
  • March 28, 2025
One thing I always tell my students is, "your story matters," because I want them to believe their observations about themselves and the world around them are worth writing about.
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tilt cover
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You’re Freaking out About Earthquakes

  • Emma Pattee
  • March 14, 2025
When I was six months pregnant, I became obsessed with the Cascadia earthquake.
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Fagin the Thief cover
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You Want to Shake Up the Syllabus

  • Allison Epstein
  • February 28, 2025
I would love to see more literature courses used to bring canonical books into conversation with other authors, taking another writer’s point of view to expand and critique the lens offered by the canon.
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autobiography of the undead
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When Walking Through a Graveyard

  • Emilio Carrero
  • February 14, 2025
What is lost so that a book may live? What is shoveled so that a memoir may memorialize?
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Cover of Too Soon
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You Need to Blaze a New Trail

  • Betty Shamieh
  • January 24, 2025
One wonders: doesn’t the cream always rise to the top? If not, whose responsibility is it to change that?
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Rental House cover
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You Don’t Want to Write

  • Weike Wang
  • December 6, 2024
Writing is a solitary venture that can get very lonely. I like having the presence of other writers around and just thinking about writing can generate a spark.
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Sky Full of Elephants cover
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You Want to be Stirred

  • Cebo Campbell
  • October 18, 2024
I like books that mean something in and outside of their own narratives, impacting my worldview. The stirring can be felt in beautiful writing, or powerful concepts, deep analysis, or emotion that resonates off the page.
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Lesser Ruins cover
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You Want to Get Lost

  • Mark Haber
  • October 4, 2024
I wanted my novel, Lesser Ruins, to feel at ease getting lost, to relish in its obsessions and procrastinations, from long descriptions of electronic music to digressions about coffee to the strange, suffocating world of academia.
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Cover of Breaking the Curse
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  • What to Read When

What to Read When You Need The Help of Mystical Forces to Combat Human Failure

  • Alex DiFrancesco
  • September 27, 2024
It takes a whole library to make a book...
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