family
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Ladies Lazarus
For Mother, two worlds—earth we inhabit together, then the hot, heavenly body of euphoria and speed. Often, Mother exists in the tear between these worlds, belonging nowhere, to no one.
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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.
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #11: Politics, Madness, and Sanity
My family was always political, but I have a love/hate relationship with politics. Today, I can feel the country swinging towards madness. And make no mistake, a country can go mad. It is familiar territory, exciting and threatening, seductive and…
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An 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,…
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This Week in Essays
For the office drones struggling to come back after the four-day weekend, take heart in James Livingston’s essay for Aeon considering whether work is necessary in our present age. Here at The Rumpus, Helen Betya Rubinstein expresses a sense of dislocation that’s…
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The Rumpus Interview with Gregory Pardlo
Poet and Pulitzer Prize winner Gregory Pardlo discusses the reverence for poetry found in other cultures, how he strings a book together, and the future of American poetry in light of our national crisis.
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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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Readers Report: Harvest
A collection of short pieces written by Rumpus readers pertaining to the subject of “Harvest.”
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Trump Dads: A Confession
Mine wears short shorts while he jogs, with a baseball cap over his baldness, and no shirt. His comes home from work and changes into a full gray sweatsuit, then sits at the head of the kitchen table to relax…
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Saturday Rumpus Fiction: Three Short Stories by Sherman Alexie
These are desperate times, and I’m not as desperate as a lot of people, but I’m desperate enough to need this job.
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What We Lost: Undoing the Fairy Tale Narrative of Adoption
The singular, unavoidable truth about adoption is that it requires the undoing of one family so that another one can come into being.
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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?