What Toulouse-Lautrec Taught Me about Intimacy
I wanted to stop withholding from them, but withholding was like a drug.
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Posts Tagged: infidelity
A Story of Memory: Machine by Susan Steinberg
The narrator is trapped here, in the summer her family and her life fell apart.
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Otherwordly: Talking with Rosebud Ben-Oni
Rosebud Ben-Oni discusses her new collection, TURN AROUND, BRXGHT XYXS.
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Voices on Addiction: The Promises
In my secret mind I saw him; I spoke to him every day.
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Both Aggressor and Victim: Adèle by Leïla Slimani
Who is Adèle Robinson, really, and what is it, exactly, that happened to her?
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A Box Full of Darkness: Talking with Adrienne Brodeur
Adrienne Brodeur discusses her new memoir, WILD GAME.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Someone Will Come and Get Us
It always feels like I’m making a mistake on purpose.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Softest Part
We sleep and we pretend to sleep. We wait for the day to turn into night.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #185: Lisa Taddeo
“It’s cruel to not say, I see you. I know you exist.”
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Be Like the Woman
And this is all like. The cloud is going around me.
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Jill Sobule’s Favorite Spy Cars
I wasn’t into girl stuff, but I loved James Bond!
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Beginnings
It is often a curse, this imagination of mine. Life pales in comparison.
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Building the Muscle: A Conversation with Kristi Coulter
Kristi Coulter discusses her debut essay collection, NOTHING GOOD CAN COME FROM THIS.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Earth Revolves around the Sun
I imagined myself from the outside: the picture of a woman waiting.
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Mom Vagina
When the physical therapist explains the electric dildo she holds in her hand will reset the nerve endings in my vagina so I won’t need to pee every hour, I say, “Get it in me and let’s go.”
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Rumpus Exclusive: “The Last Civilized House” by Lee Martin
Once upon a time, there was a man and a wife and a child that the wife decided she didn’t want.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Even the Moon
When you finished, several minutes passed before we spoke. You dipped a finger in a pool of candle wax. How could I know this was the only real secret you’d ever kept?
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Playing God: A Conversation with Daniel Olivas
Daniel Olivas discusses his recent short story collection, The King of Lighting Fixtures, writing humor, and the role of religion in his work.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Whole World Is Desert
This is what I want him to think of me. The girl poised to surf a wave under the heaviness of the full moon, the ocean around her radiant with light.
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Ten Minutes of Motherhood: A Conversation with Ariel Levy
Ariel Levy on The Rules Do Not Apply, the illusion of control, and language’s inability to express grief.
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mustard Seeds
At the end of the week, which was long with sleepless nights, Miri picked her heart out of the kitchen sink, put it in a paper lunch bag, and took it to the witch.
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Reading across Cultures: A Conversation with Ratika Kapur
Ratika Kapur discusses her latest book, The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, the disappointing romance of affairs, and how people carry on after doing the unthinkable.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: My Souls Are Out A-Wandering
What is marriage but another form of colonization? A renaming? A power taken, a power taken away?
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Summer of Families
“What do you think about this,” he said, measured and cool. “What if we offer a service where people can pay to be in our family, but only for a few hours.”
...moreThis Week in Short Fiction
This week, a new Maggie Shipstead story at Virginia Quarterly Review explores love, infidelity, and the ways life can slip from under your feet like an avalanche. Bonus: there is also a literal avalanche. The story, “Backcountry,” follows a twenty-five-year-old ski instructor named Ingrid (#1 baby name for future ski instructors) who meets a fifty-plus-year-old […]
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The Truth About Lying
My gut is a red, fiery drum, a beacon of rosy light. My instinct to run is a bright radioactive pink arrow, a bloody blade. I was correct.
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Not a Widow
I want to think of him as inhuman and selfish instead of an admirable man who eventually succumbed to a brain chemistry he had no control over.
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#Betrayal: On Instagram, Is Hell Other Women?
Instagram: an app powerful enough to blow a million Think Pieces to smithereens in everything it says about female relations.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Year of Light and Dark
It isn’t much of a contest to say that Julie Coyne is the single most inspirational human being I have ever met. And I am here—in Xela—in part because I could use a little inspiration.
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