essays

  • 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 the current and let their creativity take precedent. Yet, Lyons…

  • 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 freeing them from the constraints of word limits and limited…

  • 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 time? Grading these students’ effing papers. In a prickly and…

  • 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 readings of Rumpus contributor Grace Krilanovich and Sara Finnerty, as well as Trinie Dalton,…

  • 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 the essay’s deep history through a narrative about the development…

  • 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 since Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the modern essay,…

  • 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 Jack Kerouac, if you substituted Charlie Parker for Dr. Dre.”…

  • My Mother, My Daughter

    My mother became my daughter when I was nine years old.

  • 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 few ways out of these traps—ersatz journalistic gap filling, hapless…

  • The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement

    Rumpus Books had one hell of a week this week, and today’s a good day as any to catch up. 

  • The Rumpus Books Sunday Supplement

    It’s Sunday again, that day where you get to see what Rumpus Books has been up to this week, all in one handy little roundup.

  • The Rumpus Interview with Margaret Cho

    Margaret Cho talks about BDSM, vanilla sex, Eddie Murphy, fame, comedy, bad TV, learning guitar, writing books, and making music.