Soviet Union
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President of Smut
Our country has always been ruled by and for the privileged, but never has this glaring injustice in the system been made so shamelessly clear.
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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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TORCH: Goga
She was brave, coming to the station that day. It was still a time when people seen associating with the “traitors” could have had trouble from the KGB.
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Lower Orbits: Remembering Gherman Titov
His story is more than just a story about space, but also a story about history and how it moves. How time and space bend, burn, warp, and ignore.
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On Making Wishes
It is true that I’m talking to a photo, but I’m not crazy. Neither am I a durochka. Fools are oblivious, at least those from my childhood fairy tales. I, on the other hand, am perfectly aware of the problem.
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Looking for Russia in America
Everyone around us is speaking Russian, and I feel like we are in Russia, the old one, before the wall came down. For a moment, I even feel like I belong.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Ladies Lazarus
For Mother, two worlds—earth we inhabit together, then the hot, heavenly body of euphoria and speed. Often, Mother exists in the tear between these worlds, belonging nowhere, to no one.
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Tinfoil Astronaut
Every time I leap there is a chance I will fall, and every time I fall there is a chance I will finally crack my head open like a Faberge egg and luminous black spiders will crawl out to mark…
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Anne Raeff
Married authors Anne Raeff and Lori Ostlund, both winners of the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, discuss their craft, their process, and the way they negotiate the give and take involved in sharing a vocation.