identity
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The Rumpus Interview with Kate Walbert
Author Kate Walbert talks about her new novel, The Sunken Cathedral, about the way cities change over time, and her approach to using footnotes in fiction.
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The Rumpus Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch discusses her latest book, The Small Backs of Children, war, art, the chaos of experience, and that photograph of the vulture stalking the dying child in the Sudan that won the Pulitzer Prize.
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Rachel Dolezal: A Rumpus Roundup
Six months ago, Rachel Dolezal, an academic and the president-elect of NAACP Spokane chapter, wrote an op-ed piece piece describing the importance of the #BlackLivesMatter protest movement. On Monday, she resigned her post at the NAACP surrounded in controversy. Dolezal…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Transparent and the Evolving Culture of Shame
There’s a ray of nuclear longing at the center of Transparent…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: To Be a Brony
Today, largely by chance, a television show that was created to empower a new generation of young girls has become a beacon of strength for a community of grown men.
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I Wasn’t the White Boy Everyone Thought I Was
My connection to my Puerto Rican heritage seemed as tenuous as my connection to my white skin. I didn’t feel white, didn’t believe I had the privileges that came with whiteness.
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Am I Black Enough For You?
“Oh, she’s double-handed,” the jumping girl said. “I knew it.” It was akin to the Sandman tap-dancing to abort a stinker of a performance at the Apollo Theater. I was done.
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A Wild Excerpt from White Girls
Guernica has a lengthy excerpt up from White Girls, the genre-warping new collection of cultural criticism, personal memoir, and who knows what else by the New Yorker‘s Hilton Als. It’s complex, challenging, and completely, enthrallingly beautiful, so it’s impossible to choose…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: On Color, Brain Cancer, and the Possibility I am Already Dead
When the author discovers that even his “favorite color” isn’t safe from reinvention, he sets out to explore what it means to maintain a fixed identity over time.
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I Internet, Therefore I am!
What defines a person’s existence? A photo ID or their Internet activity? It’s a question that has been losing its irony lately. There’s the news of a traveling couple that allegedly went missing in Perú but in actuality was just…
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The Big Idea: Andrew Solomon
Writer and journalist Andrew Solomon talks about parent-child differences, and the eleven-year process of writing his latest book, which profiles families of deaf, dwarf, autistic, severely disabled, transgendered, schizophrenic, and other marginalized children.
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Only Human
“For days after the birth Treadway knew there was a secret. He felt the secret exactly as he felt the presence of a white ptarmigan behind him in the snow, and he knew a decision had to be made.”