How to Keep Calm and Carry On
Your mind doesn’t play tricks on you. You play tricks on your mind.
...moreYour mind doesn’t play tricks on you. You play tricks on your mind.
...moreIngrid Rojas Contreras discusses her debut novel, FRUIT OF THE DRUNKEN TREE.
...moreDoesn’t murder exclude a person from being described as “a good guy”?
...moreIn the dark, I felt at home in the underground bunker where the hospital stored its violent men.
...moreIf you ask me why I did it, I can’t give you a proper answer. I was hungry and didn’t have much money, but it wasn’t like I was homeless or went to sleep starving.
...moreWhat I know and don’t know about men matters. What men know and don’t know about themselves matters more.
...moreTerese Marie Mailhot discusses her debut memoir, Heart Berries, crafting trauma on the page, and her views on motherhood after writing her memoir.
...moreKayleb Rae Candrilli discusses their debut collection, What Runs Over, reclaiming memory through poetry, and the political act of being happy.
...moreI don’t feel ashamed of my history, I feel ashamed of letting it be erased.
...moreKatia D. Ulysse discusses her forthcoming novel, Mouths Don’t Speak, the importance of religion and music in the novel and in Haitian culture, and why Haiti will always be “home.”
...moreAriel Gore discusses her new novel We Were Witches, why capitalism and the banking system are the real enemies, and finding the limits between memoir and fiction.
...moreCapturing the Delta in harrowing detail, Ward takes readers on a journey from her own home of the Gulf Coast to the Mississippi State Penitentiary.
...moreJay Baron Nicorvo discusses his debut novel, The Standard Grand, how easy it is for civilians to forget about soldiers and veterans, and his longstanding love of animals.
...moreHave you ever seen a feathery shadow at the edge of your eye? Was it a figure? Did it cross into your vision, like a hummingbird there and gone?
...moreJenny Zhang discusses her story collection Sour Heart, trying to escape the past, collective versus individual responsibility for trauma, and love as imprisonment.
...moreShe never stopped, a bee buzzing from flower to flower to flower, collecting all the sweetness she could.
...moreFive months after my dad’s eviction, in the warehouse, I looked through cardboard boxes, stacked on top of one another like a game of Jenga.
...moreFor Huffington Post’s Highline magazine, Jason Fagone profiles a trauma surgeon working to make a small dent in our country’s problem with gun violence. At Catapult, Abbey Fenbert writes a funny, heartfelt essay about trying to ban books in the seventh grade.
...moreRatika 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.
...moreAdrian Matejka discusses his new collection Map to the Stars, writing about poverty in contemporary poetry, and how racism maintains its place in our society.
...morePoverty may have been beloved of St. Francis, but not so much by the rest of us. Nobody likes to look at advanced poverty, toothless and drooling, clutching the hands of children who have running sores on their filthy legs. Poverty is a crackhead who pisses on the pavement, and sleeps with fleas and stray […]
...moreBonnie Jo Campbell discusses her collection Mothers, Tell Your Daughters, the natural world as a character, and finding writing from the male point of view easier.
...moreIn Episode 37 of The Rumpus’s Make/Work podcast, Scott Pinkmountain speaks with composer, singer, and producer Melody Parker about her incredible new album, Archipelago.
...moreWhat is the distance between sympathy and action? How do we travel from one to the other?
...moreNow he started to cry and couldn’t stop the tears. He’d found a way to beat his hunger until the next meal, and he didn’t know when that would be. Hunger, his acts from hunger, made him cry.
...more“Rhythm is the rebel,” Chuck D raps on “Louder Than A Bomb,” one of many outstanding tracks from Public Enemy’s touchstone 1988 record, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Of all the controversial and heartfelt statements made on this widely acclaimed and influential album, this is perhaps the most telling, as DJ […]
...moreI assume he’s going to drop us off, wish us luck, and speed away. But instead Little Wei slams on his brakes, turns off the ignition, and says, “I will climb, too.”
...moreFirst, in Rumpus Saturday Fiction, Sherman Alexie’s shares three short stories—”Fixed Income,” “Honor Society,” and “Valediction”—that all offer his trademark whimsy and insight into the human condition. Three different teenagers struggle with poverty, endemic racism, and social exclusion, and must depend upon themselves to make the right choices in difficult moral situations. Then, in the […]
...moreJ.D. Vance talks about his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis, the perils of upward mobility, and never forgetting where you come from.
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