Rumpus Original Fiction: The Basement
Looking back, it feels like I knew.
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Posts Tagged: brothers
TORCH: The Reunion
He was and still is a stranger, uninhabitable and distant like a whisper in a language I don’t quite understand.
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Voices on Addiction: What We Forget, What We Remember
I don’t remember when [my brother] ran away; I just remember him being gone more often than not.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: One of Them Dies
We seldom forget when people promise to give us something, whether we need or want that thing or not. I promise you death, you want a death.
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The Dark All Around Us
There is still light in the dark. This is the paradox that Little Bear has to accept in order to fall asleep.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #113: Tom Stern
“[T]his admittedly bizarre idea just came into focus for me that Walter was actually pregnant with his own twin brother who would be obsessed with getting his MBA.”
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Come Together through Bodies: Jennifer Colville’s Elegies for Uncanny Girls
The female body here is as palpable as image. As the images and objects transform, so does the female’s body.
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Voices on Addiction: The Honeybee
She never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
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Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jessica Berger Gross
Jessica Berger Gross discusses her new memoir, Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home, walking away from her parents age of twenty-eight, and the importance of boundaries.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Straw House
“It’s not healthy, how you live. People aren’t meant to sleep all day. We need the sun. We’re meant to live in the sun.”
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 2
There isn’t even a discussion. There aren’t any words. You just start swinging—the building is a fence, your cousins are a fence. The two of you are surrounded. There’s no escape for either of you.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Pet the Dog
It would be simple to say that she is missing the internal formulation that makes one enthusiastic about dogs. And that would be true, partially. Was she, as their mother once said, a cold fish?
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Letter to Jim
Many days I couldn’t see the way forward, but I kept going, the way you had. It was you, after all, who taught me how to stay.
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Fitting Characters and Scripts
Unwittingly, my mother teaches me in this conversation her generation’s word for gay: 同性恋. I look it up in an online dictionary, three characters in my mother’s tongue. Same, sex, and love.
...moreAn Open Letter to My Brother, A Trump Supporter
Dear John, I, like so many other Americans, spent the past weeks worrying, crying, and searching for the people around me that I loved so they could be beacons when I felt most battered. I did not seek you out, did not call or text you, did not respond to your victory message because I […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Red Whole
I’ve become an abridged version of myself—made half-done and meager. Made hungry for answers.
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Farewell, Professor Wiesel
Faith is about action, Professor Wiesel said that day. Faith is about what you do with that faith. Belief in God is to do, not to accept. So always the question: what can we do?
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Albums of Our Lives: Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Before you came along, I don’t think I actually had a musical identity.
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Boy of My Youth
In my desperate attempts to keep my secret I learned to shut everyone out, to become as closed as a fist.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Monkey Men
Still lying on the bed in the Wausau hotel room, I started counting ceiling tiles. From above the covers. Not under. Never under. I always feel constricted, under.
...moreSong of the Day: “Don’t Save Me”
Male siblings seem to dominate many famous musical groups. Examples range from contemporary bands like Kings of Leon and The National to household names like The Jackson 5, The Beach Boys, The Allman Brothers, The Isley Brothers and The Neville Brothers. So it’s about time the ladies earned a bit of the spotlight. Though the sisters in HAIM—Este, Danielle, and Alana—grew up playing […]
...moreA Tale of Two Siblings
For the New York Times’s Bookends column, Thomas Mallon and Leslie Jamison muse on the books that best capture the intricate and fraught relationships between siblings: That’s what I felt Faulkner intuited about siblings: that there were all sorts of gaps and harms and distances that might befall them, that they might inflict on each other, […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Cote Smith
Cote Smith talks about his debut novel, Hurt People, growing up in a prison town, using rejection as motivation, and brotherly love.
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Are We All Our Own Vanishing
We will never be an exclamation point, an ellipses, a question mark. We must all leave with this: a period—solid, and utterly irrefutable.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Remembering Molly
Ten years later I still wondered about those aviator glasses and whether The Breakfast Club could restore us.
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Karrie Higgins
The more narratives that approach reality “differently” get treated as “insane” or “unreal,” the less readers are exposed to them, and the more “unreal” or “insane” they seem. It’s like a feedback loop.
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