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A Box Full of Darkness: Talking with Adrienne Brodeur
Acquired by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for seven figures following a fourteen-publisher bidding war, Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me might have just the right industry bona fides and...
View ArticleMore Than Ordinary: If the House by Molly Spencer
“The poet speaks on the threshold of being,” writes Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space. For Bachelard, the house represents a “concentration of intimacy,” offering a locus of scenes and images of...
View ArticleBoth Aggressor and Victim: Adèle by Leïla Slimani
Leïla Slimani’s international debut Lullaby (2016)—published as The Perfect Nanny in the US in 2018—established Slimani’s global reputation as an author who excels at the unnerving. Her sophomore...
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Rumpus Exclusive: “The Hunger”
Plumes of cigarette smoke burned her nose hairs as she failed to inhale. Lilly never really learned how to smoke the right way. It was better for her asthma that way. As she ashed on Chin’s cold...
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Voices on Addiction: The Promises
We will regain control of our lives. “Do they know my name,” he asked, “the people in your group?” It was summer in Texas. I unpeeled my thighs from the driver’s seat and crossed the street toward my...
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Voices on Addiction: Chicken Marsala and Meth
My sister, who is indisputably the best cook in the family, once whipped up chicken Marsala from only what was already in her fridge. I was impressed by this feat, and by how good it tasted with the...
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Love Story as Case Study: A Conversation with Rheea Mukherjee
Nearly ten years ago, Rheea Mukherjee and I met as students in the graduate creative writing program at California College for the Arts in San Francisco. We became fast friends; I was fascinated by...
View ArticleENOUGH: Give Me the Biggest Piece You Have
ENOUGH is a Rumpus series devoted to creating a dedicated space for essays, poetry, fiction, comics, and artwork by women and non-binary people that engage with rape culture, sexual assault, and...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Biswell and Hope, Christmas: A Story in Four Epiphanies
I. Biswell’s older brother, Roddy, picks them up at the airport. On the way back to their mother’s house, he can’t stop fiddling with the Plymouth’s aged heater knobs on the dashboard. “You know what...
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A Soul-Satisfying Crunch: Kitchen Sink Granola Bars
Gene, the silver-haired retired truck driver sitting across from me, raked a napkin over his plate discreetly, but I saw it. He glanced longingly at the piece of pecan pie being devoured by his wife...
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Lesbian Poetry’s Vatic Voices: The Specter of Ecocatastrophe
I. During the Women’s Liberation Movement, poets were scribes of passion and purpose for the movement; they operated as theorists and visionary holders of hope. In recent years, lesbian-feminist poets...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #203: Molly Spencer
Molly Spencer’s debut collection of poetry, If the House, was chosen by Carl Phillips for the 2019 Brittingham Prize. Her recent poetry has appeared in FIELD, The Georgia Review, New England Review,...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Ojalá
It’s her third August in Barcelona and Mona still gets lost anytime she leaves her neighborhood of Raval. When she’d first moved here, she found the children selling candy bars and the drying laundry...
View ArticleExceptional Pain and Power: Lima :: Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico
There are so many reasons you might pick up a book in the first place. Perhaps you have a fondness for a certain publishing house, a history of reading—and loving—books from that particular press. Or...
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Be a Reed in the Wind: Talking with Aisha Sharif
Aisha Sharif is a poet and educator who has published widely, been nominated for a Pushcart, and is a Cave Canem fellow. Her work explores how identities of race, gender, and religion come together,...
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A Political Pregnancy
The spring that Trump wins the Republican primary, I discover I am pregnant with my second child. The pregnancy is unintended. A surprise. A month after I tell my husband I want to stop at one child,...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Mother We Share
Whenever I am in a crowded room, I find a person standing far away and wait until they look in my general direction. I imagine they’re really looking right at me. We forge a connection, plan without...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #205: Beth Alvarado
Beth Alvarado’s latest is Anxious Attachments, whose essays, Aisha Sabatini Sloan says, “evoke the fluidity and awe of an underwater journey.” Anxious Attachments has just been longlisted for the PEN...
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Your Schooling Is Your Voice: Talking with Abi Daré
In Abi Darè’s debut novel, The Girl with the Louding Voice, out this month from Dutton, fourteen-year-old Adunni fights for an education and the right to choose her own future. At the outset of the...
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Turning Purple: The Year of the Defector
When my first marriage ended, he picked the East Village and I moved my little pile of things into a Philadelphia loft above a restaurant called Golden Chopsticks, a name that felt hopeful and shiny...
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