I Wasn’t the White Boy Everyone Thought I Was
My connection to my Puerto Rican heritage seemed as tenuous as my connection to my white skin. I didn’t feel white, didn’t believe I had the privileges that came with whiteness.
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essays
184 posts
Figuring Out What Essays Are
What’s the difference between an essay and a novel? Teju Cole considered that question in his 2012 essay, “The White Savior Industrial Complex,” writing that essays have points, while novels do…
Roxane Gay and Leslie Jamison Get Personal About Essays
Rumpus essays editor and author of the forthcoming essay collection Bad Feminist Roxane Gay sat down to talk with The Empathy Exams author Leslie Jamison and Michele Filgate; the three women had an insightful…
Annie Dillard and the Art of the Essay
“Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.” Read an essay on Annie Dillard’s philosophy of the essay and its writer over at Brain…
Drugs and Creativity
Gila Lyons has a strikingly vulnerable essay at The Millions about her decision to start taking anti-anxiety medication. Typically, artists who suffer from mental health issues opt to ride against…
How Has the Internet Changed Longform Journalism?
Ideally, online longform nonfiction combines the strengths of the print world with those of the Internet, granting writers the rigorous editing and reporting resources they’d get at a magazine but…
Is It Time to Get Rid of College Essays?
Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utterwasteof their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of…
Come To The Frequencies #3 Release Party In LA!
LA Rockers! Go to Stories Books and Cafe tonight at 7 pm for the release of Two Dollar Radio’s Frequencies #3, a biannual journal of artful essays. The release party features the stylistic…
Celebrating the Essay
The topic of essayism—one especially relevant to the Rumpus—is granted the meticulous attention it deserves in this opinion piece Christy Wampole wrote for the New York Times. Wampole artfully weaves…
Keep Doubt Alive with Essays
If you’re a regular Rumpus reader, you probably like essays. And if you like essays, you’ll probably enjoy this New York Times opinion piece about their literary and social value: Ever…
My Heart is an Idiot Book Trailer
Earlier this month, we spoke with Davy Rothbart about the his new collection, My Heart Is an Idiot, lauded in this week’s Rumpus review as “16 essays that read like early…
Money Novels
In the current issue of BookForum, Christian Lorentzen, an editor at the London Review of Books, writes about “the perils of money fiction” in the twenty-first century. “There are a…