class
-
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.
-
Rich 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…
-
Children 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.”
-
The 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.
-
Weekend 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…
-
La Boheme Portlandia
As for gentrification, like in every desirable part of the country, economics decide the contest, and wealth wins every time.
-
Have 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.
-
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.
-
Steve 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…
-
The 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…
-
The Rumpus Original Combo with Danzy Senna
We are all students of memory. Each of us has our own truth to tell.
-
The 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.…