identity
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Skinning the Wildcat
My son was not born my son. My son was born my daughter.
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Fiction’s Rise of Female Friendships
Readers are shifting focus from outdated gender expectations and conceptions of identity, and as a result, complex, non-compartmentalized female friendships are blooming in fiction. Books about these friendships are spaces for female writers and readers to explore the complexity of…
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Boy of My Youth
In my desperate attempts to keep my secret I learned to shut everyone out, to become as closed as a fist.
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Reading Between the Lines
Life, the book. The long gay book. / Do you remember? Should you remember? / What are our stories about? In an essay for Lit Hub, Matthew Cheney narrates growing up during the AIDS crisis, and the intertwined relationships between…
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This Week in Short Fiction
This week at Recommended Reading, PEN America offers an excerpt from Brazilian author Noemi Jaffe’s novel Írisz: as orquídeas, which is remarkable for many reasons, one of them being that this is so far the only opportunity to read part of…
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The Power of a T-Shirt
In the latest Lenny Letter, Lena Waithe discusses how she learned how to express her identity through fashion in the vintage tee section of a thrift shop: The shirt wasn’t expensive. It wasn’t made in Italy. And unless you were…
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Kamden Hilliard
Survival is not always cute, politically responsible, mature, or sober. Survival is ramshackle, as is tolerance.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Used to Be Schwartz
When I told my friend Aharon that my family name used to be Schwartz, he said, “Used to be Schwartz—sounds like a Borscht Belt act.”
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Neither Here Nor There
Brooklyn Magazine’s Gina Florio poignantly discusses the pain of experiencing microaggressions from her own extended family, and “mastering [her] biracial identity:” I know we’ll eventually find ourselves in another similar situation, in which they’ll hurt me without trying to, marginalize…
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This Week in Short Fiction
If you’re not yet aware of the online magazine Storychord, take this chance to get acquainted. Each issue features a short story, a piece of visual art, and a musical composition, which combine to make a sort of multimedia storytelling…
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Michael Derrick Hudson, Before You Steal My Chinese Name
Know that you are trying to steal from a naming ritual and culture that goes back five thousand years.
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The Rumpus Interview with Jennifer Barber
Poet Jennifer Barber discusses loss, identity, historical trauma, and her newest collection, Works on Paper.