Rumpus Exclusive: “Passing as Privileged”
I don’t feel ashamed of my history, I feel ashamed of letting it be erased.
...more
Posts Tagged: class
The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Katia D. Ulysse
Katia D. Ulysse discusses her forthcoming novel, Mouths Don’t Speak, the importance of religion and music in the novel and in Haitian culture, and why Haiti will always be “home.”
...more
The Universal Tether of Identity: Caca Dolce by Chelsea Martin
At its core, the collection is recollected through a loose chronology of memoir essays, all of which will appeal to readers’ younger selves: who were we when we were teenagers and who are we now?
...more
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Nikki Wallschlaeger
Nikki Wallschlaeger discusses her new collection Crawlspace, why she chose to work with the sonnet form, and how segregation in American never ended.
...more
Personal, Political, and Poetic: A Conversation with Susan Briante
Susan Briante discusses The Market Wonders, her newest collection of poetry in which she draws on market indicators like the Dow Jones Industrial Average to construct a criticism of contemporary culture.
...more
(K)ink: Writing While Deviant: E. A. Longfellow
The way I think about my writing is similar to the way I think about my kink—both have to do with history and the ethics around appropriation.
...moreNotable NYC: 1/7–1/13
Saturday 1/7: Greenlight Bookstore celebrates the grand opening of the store’s second location in Prospect Lefferts Gardens. 632 Flatbush Avenue, 7:30 p.m., free. Camonghne Felix and José Olivarez join the Segue Series. Zinc Bar, 4:30 p.m., $5. Sunday 1/8: Nancy Hightower, Sarah Perry, Jeremy Freedman, and Linda Harris Dolan join the Sundays at Erv’s reading […]
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with J.D. Vance
J.D. Vance talks about his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, the perils of upward mobility, and never forgetting where you come from.
...more
America Again
I felt urgently that it was the moment to tell the story of what I’ve learned about American music—or maybe about being an American.
...moreThe Pleasure of Recognition
Ferrante’s novels about women like Lila and Lenu are a potent reminder that working-class women’s perspectives are out there, even if we can’t always hear each other, even if we’re sometimes embarrassed and alone, even if we feel exasperated by a system that valorizes experiences and credentials that we can never claim. At VIDA, Valeria […]
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Interview with Ramona Ausubel
I find tremendous hope in the act of storytelling—the way we can redirect energy, to reclaim history, to build back lives that have been otherwise upset.
...moreRich Enough That I Don’t Have to Tell ‘Em That I’m Rich
Since its publication twenty years ago, Frances Mayes’s memoir Under the Tuscan Sun has transformed its namesake Italian setting into a sort of synonym for a wealthy lifestyle. Travel writer Jason Wilson revisited the work only to discover exactly the charms it so frustratingly popularized: However I feel about Mayes and her privilege, and the marketing […]
...moreChildren in Numbers
At Guernica, poet Susan Briante shares a personal, lyric essay on motherhood in a system—our own—undergirded by the valuation of children. “Dusk traffics light, the light scans her” becomes “The market scans my child, calculates pecuniary value.”
...moreThe Invisible Lower Class
Raymond Carver and other “Kmart realists” championed the working class in high-brow literary fiction. But has the realism of the 99% gone out of style? Electric Literature explores.
...moreWeekend Rumpus Roundup
First, Brandon Hicks allows us a peek into psychological disorders of the animal kingdom, the most elite bars in the world, and more in “Just Some Jokes.” Then, in the Saturday Interview, our own Arielle Bernstein talks with blogger Josie Pickens about identity, gender, race, and class politics. The “uplifting” influence of readers on social media provides […]
...more
La Boheme Portlandia
As for gentrification, like in every desirable part of the country, economics decide the contest, and wealth wins every time.
...moreHave You Met the Huckster?
At Notches, a peer-reviewed blog on history and sexuality, Robert J. Gamble explores the figure of the 19th century female huckster as well as the middle-class anxieties that slandered and vilified them.
...more
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Bill Cosby’s Faux Legacy
Bill Cosby was never the man, the icon, the protector and illustrator of black culture, the guide, the genius we have created in our minds.
...moreSteve Almond Adds Class on Sex Writing
Steve Almond, our friend and author of not one but two Rumpus columns, is teaching three classes in the Bay Area on the weekend of December 7–8. In addition to the classes on obsession and humor in San Francisco that we blogged about earlier, Steve will be conducting a “freewheeling workshop” in Oakland on how […]
...moreThe Other One Percent
I’m at NYU Dental waiting to get a cavity filled. I’m at NYU Dental because I’m poor, although if I were really poor — I am thinking — I wouldn’t be at a dentist at all. I happen to be reading Michelle Tea’s Without a Net, the first time I have ever read literature about […]
...more
The Rumpus Original Combo with Danzy Senna
We are all students of memory. Each of us has our own truth to tell.
...moreThe Axis of Empathy
Much has been written recently about Pakistan, most of it having to do with George W. Bush’s War on Terror. Where exactly is bin Laden hiding? Is the Pakistani government doing enough to help find him? And what of A.Q. Khan? What does the Pakistani nuclear scientist’s release from house arrest tell us about the […]
...more