A Travel Guide to the City of Ghosts
Standing alone before the house, I think: love can be a sad, strange thing.
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Posts Tagged: ghosts
Hannibal Lecter, My Therapist
In the dark, I felt at home in the underground bunker where the hospital stored its violent men.
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Tessa Fontaine’s The Electric Woman
Sometimes a story suddenly changes.
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Ready to See Magic Everywhere: Talking with Rachel Lyon
Rachel Lyon discusses her debut novel, Self-Portrait with Boy, artistic communities, the quotidian nature of the supernatural, and hyper-gentrification.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Rebecca
Grace shook her head, surprised by both her reluctance to speak and her impulse to lie. She had seen many photos of Rebecca.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: One of Them Dies
We seldom forget when people promise to give us something, whether we need or want that thing or not. I promise you death, you want a death.
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That Monster Is Right There: Talking with Colin Winnette
Colin Winnette discusses his new novel, The Job of the Wasp, the nature of horror and his approach to writing it, and the fear at the heart of the book.
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Living in the Realm of the Subconscious: Talking with Melissa Fraterrigo
Melissa Fraterrigo discusses her new novel-in-stories, Glory Days, writing speculative fiction, and how our formative years influence us later in life.
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Kundiman for a Ghost
I can’t unlock the unlockable. I can’t understand the whispers of the dead no matter how loud they scream in the scatter
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R.I.P.: Who Died in This House?
Death stigmatizes a property. I also believe that it stigmatizes a person.
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Ward’s Mississippi Is Our Mississippi: Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward
Capturing the Delta in harrowing detail, Ward takes readers on a journey from her own home of the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
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Visitations: Gwendolyn Brooks at One Hundred
A visitation is how I describe the past weeks walking with Gwendolyn Books. It is like she is just around every corner.
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Ghostly Woman
I had never lived in a real haunted house. I didn’t know what any of the rules were. Could her presence cause physical harm?
...moreThis Week in Essays
Happy International Women’s Day! Why not read some essays if you have extra time today, starting with Dayna Tortorici laying out the reasons for striking today at n + 1. Timothy Denevi ventured to CPAC and got a front row seat to the banality of evil for Lit Hub. J. Malcolm Garcia dives deep into the story of a […]
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The Rumpus Interview With Danielle Trussoni
Danielle Trussoni discusses her new memoir, The Fortress, black magic, the cult of marriage, and the dark side of storytelling.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Pinpricks
Time is king. Believers, agnostics or atheists—humans or not: time rules us. We submit to it, surrender to it, and are shaped by it.
...moreCheck out Any Time You Like, but You Can Never Leave
Do you think he stood her up? At the altar I mean? Or left her afterwards? Or she found out he was having an affair? Ollie seems almost gleeful. Unhappy visitors cheer him up. I think they make him feel less alone. They remind him that you don’t have to be dead to be pathetic. […]
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In This Hell Here With You
When people call other people crazy I don’t get mad, I get bored. When people tell me ghosts don’t exist, I just get bored. Over at JSTOR Daily, poet Dorothea Lasky writes about The Imagination, “a physical space that one shares with other people in and through poetry,” the palpable materiality of alternative existences (like […]
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The Rumpus Review of Ghostbusters
An agenda can only exist when there is a contingent opposing it. We only push for representation when so many hours and characters of wrath are poured into keeping us out.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Laura Ballance’s Ghost Stories
There is one story that my mother used to tell me often, which has become in some ways a symbol of my childhood.
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Podcatcher #1: Oh No, Ross and Carrie!
In the first installment of our new column all about podcasts, we talk with Ross Blocher and Carrie Poppy of Oh No, Ross and Carrie!.
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R.I.P.: The Time Is Near
This wasn’t my first attempt to commune with the dead.
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The Rumpus Interview with Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros, author of The House on Mango Street, talks about her new memoir, A House of My Own, living in a post-9/11 era, and the necessity of heartbreak.
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Evil Working for Good
How a culture of goblins and ghouls led to the revival of a small Midwestern town.
...moreThe Ghostly Power of Mirrors
Colin Dickey writes for Hazlitt about the practice of covering mirrors after a death: There seems to be no universal reason behind the custom. Reginald Fleming Johnston, documenting this practice in China in 1910, claimed that the reason mirrors are covered is because “if the dead man happens to notice a reflection of himself in […]
...moreThe Long Shadows of the Dead
I sobbed as I read, for the first time grieving someone I’d never known, but also grieving for myself because I was alive, and convinced I could never be as good. Natalie Villacorta writes for The Offing about the dead girl who used to live in her apartment.
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The Rumpus Interview with Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai talks about ghosts, teaching, chronology in writing, and her new novel, The Hundred-Year House.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: American Horror in New Orleans
I came home from work the other day and found a notice taped to my front door. It had the logo for the FX television series American Horror Story on it and announced they would be filming on my block that weekend.
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