fathers
-

Rumpus Original Fiction: Salt
A flash-fire covered the horizon all around and behind her, and my mother glowed genuine blue. I saw her skeleton, or maybe her white-hot soul. Something flew up and around our heads.
-

Market Researching My Desire
I noted the weirdness, and then filed it away until a time I might really consider the implications of wanting to bury someone’s stockings. I was lost in metaphor, which meant I was lost in everything.
-

The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Pet the Dog
It would be simple to say that she is missing the internal formulation that makes one enthusiastic about dogs. And that would be true, partially. Was she, as their mother once said, a cold fish?
-

The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #64: Lianne Stokes
Hi there! We’re the two brunettes who hate sex. Sara-Kate hates sex because it’s too aerobic—she once sprained her foot. She lives in Kips Bay, loves candy, and wears exclusively rompers. Elisa Jordana hates sex because she abhors the human…
-

Is It My Story or Yours?
Our family stories mutate with every retelling across the generations like a game of telephone, until the thin, sharp line of fact becomes frayed and hazy.
-

The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #62: Julian Tepper
Upon publication of his first novel, Balls, author Julian Tepper received pointed advice from one Philip Roth: quit. What the elder statesman, on the verge of his own retirement, was trying to say is that the writing life is “just…
-

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.
-

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…


