Don’t Think Twice and the Power of Improvising through the Unknown
It’s a little extraordinary when you realize that you’re the one getting in your own way.
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Posts Tagged: growing up
The Saturday Rumpus Essay: An Audience with the Husband
To ask for a truly great love is to ask for death at the same time.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #71: Kris D’Agostino
In Kris D’Agostino’s second novel, The Antiques, he returns to familiar forms: A dysfunctional family whose members are in various stages of arrested development; a generational home in upstate New York; and the absurdity of life in its most darkly comedic moments. Here, the three grown (yet hardly mature) children of the Westfall family reunite […]
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: I Died of Dysentery
The glorious ways we fifth graders died in Mr. Mosher’s computer class. We strove to die in the most imaginable permutations possible.
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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.
...moreThe 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 penis and all its functions. Not a fan of balls, either. She lives on the […]
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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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The Rumpus Interview with Wendy C. Ortiz
Wendy C. Ortiz discusses her new book Bruja, what a “dreamoire” is, the magic all around us, and why she loves indices—and cats.
...moreA “Girl” and Her Mother
At The Millions, Naa Baako Ako-Adjei discusses reading Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” through the lens of her relationship with her own mother growing up, and her new understanding of the story fifteen years later: In my rereading of “Girl,” I also realized that I never noticed how transgressive the story is. The mother’s liturgy about behaving […]
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A Study of Homeland in Displacement
To think of Brazil as a different place than I remember it is to think of my unbelonging, as someone out of place in my memory.
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Rion Amilcar Scott
Rion Amilcar Scott discusses his new collection Insurrections, creating a fictional town, and the pressure to make religious decisions during puberty.
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The Rumpus Interview with Ann Packer
Ann Packer discusses her most recent novel The Children’s Crusade, artistic mothers, the writer and her “first principle,” and the fight to like your own characters.
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The Surprising Magic of Bad Books
Any story about a fairy is a story about female power.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Monkey Men
Still lying on the bed in the Wausau hotel room, I started counting ceiling tiles. From above the covers. Not under. Never under. I always feel constricted, under.
...moreDigital Airport
Visit Guernica’s gateway to ten personal essays on growing up around the world.
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The Commune
Our house, we believed, was a microcosm of that country. Every month, we’d gather at the kitchen table for our house meeting, where we, like politicians, unveiled our big plans for change.
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
In a darkly humorous new story at n+1, Jen George questions the qualifications of being “adult,” gives thirty-somethings across the world nightmares, and packs in plenty of social criticism while she’s at it. The story, “Guidance/The Party,” follows a single, childless, career-less, 33-year-old woman who is visited by a mysterious Guide. The Guide has been […]
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Reading Mademoiselle Gantrel
We squinted into the smoky room and saw ourselves on junior year abroad, frolicking on the Left Bank with artists in berets like hers.
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Albums of Our Lives: Scissor Sisters’s Night Work
Night Work is a queer sonic fantasia soaked heavy in the 1980s.
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On Playing Games, Productivity, and Right Livelihood
One week last spring I said it out loud for the first time: “Sometimes I play so long, my fingers go numb.”
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Five Stages of Prince Fandom
You don’t need to know him personally, you say. You get the best of Prince through his music. Maybe that’s the truth, and maybe it isn’t.
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Primal Talk
One of the thrills of being a writer is becoming aware of the wildness that percolates inside of you. If you’ve learned to listen, you’re able to hear it.
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Goodbye, Starman
It’s not an exaggeration to say that Bowie saved my life on more than one occasion. And now that he’s gone, I’m at a loss again.
...moreWhen Does a Writer Grow Up?
The Atlantic examines adulthood and how we get there, including a close look at the life of a writer: Henry published his first book…when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and bouncing back and forth between his parents’ home, living on his own, and crashing with a buddy, who believed in […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Remembering Molly
Ten years later I still wondered about those aviator glasses and whether The Breakfast Club could restore us.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Wanting To Dance
It just felt so comfortable to slide back into singing, “She Loves You,” and know for that moment, everything was the same.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Shameless
I’ve always been somewhat prone to obsession, but my years of intense Britney fandom were the first time that I felt that strongly about an individual person.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Out on the Coast
When he was five, six, seven, and eight, Max spent most of the summer thinking about the whale, sitting in his room with the shades drawn remembering the first visit and looking forward to the second, just before the new school year.
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