Loneliness
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Melissa Broder
Melissa Broder discusses her debut novel, The Pisces (Hogarth, May 2018), the importance of love between women, and mermaid sex.
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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.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Brit Bennett
Brit Bennett discusses her debut novel The Mothers, investigating “what-if” moments, and navigating racism in white spaces.
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You Are Never Alone If There’s a Poem
I’ve often wondered if my turn to poetry in times of loneliness and uncertainty is a behavior that’s naturally implicit within the genre or if it upholds some cliché notion of what poetry is and should be. Is poetry a…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Unrecognized Brownie, Circa 1978
I picture families lingering over albums in the faraway future, someone leaning over someone else’s shoulder, pointing at me, asking, Who was that?
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Just Dance
Well, that’s the point of being alone—it’s not anything to do with you. It’s about being something in someone else’s life, and no one ever knows the difference, or the truth. That’s why people like bad movies and bad fiction,…
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Dear McSweeney’s: Two Letters from Stephen Elliott
I’ve been traveling for two weeks and people prone to the kind of thoughts I’m prone to should never be alone out in the world.
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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.
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This Week in Short Fiction
Over the last several weeks, The Offing has been releasing a stream of stunning work from its 2015 Trans Issue, and the collection of transgender/non-binary voices they’ve cultivated forms one of the most powerful issues of any magazine we’ve seen this…
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War Narratives #4: Meet the Civilians
Each character achieves independence in his own way, but independence winds up looking a lot like loneliness.
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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 Review of The Martian
It is the story of an astronaut stranded on Mars for about a year, all by himself.