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All These Ostriches: A Conversation with R. Eric Thomas
R. Eric Thomas is my best friend. We’ve never met, of course, but I have been regularly reading his weekly newsletter and his ELLE Magazine column for forever and have laughed to the point of...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Witch House
I’m not saying polyamory can’t work after you have kids. I’m just saying it stopped working for me. I didn’t want another lover. I just wanted someone to help with the dishes. Even in our hip little...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Howard County Rapture
It was a Friday morning at 9:34 a.m. when the Rapture occurred. Dan Sapp of Dan Sapp Automotive and Dan Sapp Roadside Assistance was pouring himself another cup of Folgers from the twenty-year-old Mr....
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Too Close to Home
I tell my body to sink into our leather couch because people are outside firing their guns into the cold black sky as if they have lost their natural black minds. I keep sinking deeper and deeper...
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What Toulouse-Lautrec Taught Me about Intimacy
I stood transfixed and I stared at the two faces in the painting. Covers up to the chin, tousled brown hair, turned toward one another, closeness reflected in the bloom of their cheeks. I wondered if...
View ArticleENOUGH: Trapped
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, the Surprise Pregnancy, Conception
“You’re a bomb,” Biswell says to Hope. “Do you want to eat something? Sometimes sex makes me hungry.” “A good bomb, but still a bomb.” He’s thinking about dropping out of law school. He has sex with...
View ArticleThe Joypain of Parenting: Lydia Kiesling’s The Golden State
The Golden State is a novel so dialed into its own rhetorical structure and method of execution, so confident in its delivery, that anyone who is writing fiction today would do well to study its...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Biswell and Hope and the Job, A Story in Five...
I. “What if the past is always better than the future,” Biswell says, “by definition?” He’s rinsing off in Hope’s shower, which is now his shower now. She’s rubbing fog from the mirror and putting on...
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What It Means to Be a Human: Talking with Maggie Downs
It all started with her mother’s subscription to National Geographic magazine when Maggie Downs was a child: Every month, when a new issue arrived, my mom and I sat at the kitchen table and let the...
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My Kyiv
We got yelled at in the supermarket in Kyiv last summer. “Hey! This is some bullshit!” a woman cried, as we cut in front of her in the checkout line. Stout with a granite face, she glared at us over...
View ArticleENOUGH: Beautiful Teeth
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 Get a Dog, A Story in Three Epiphanies
I. “That woman was calling her dog in the middle of the night,” Hope says. “She just kept calling Coco! Coco! Coco!” They’re still in bed. It’s Saturday, mid-morning. The room is dark because of the...
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The Mentor Series: Cynthia Newberry Martin and Pam Houston
I hope you take a moment to savor this interview between Cynthia Newberry Martin and her mentor, Pam Houston. How they met: “Early in 2006, I decided that what my writing needed was to work with Pam...
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Marital Piss
After Dan and I first had sex, curiosity set in. I liked his long, lean frame and matching dick. But all I knew about him was that he was an ordained minister studying to be a lawyer—a surprising...
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Silence Is the Fertile Field: Talking with Fenton Johnson
In an early draft of his latest book, At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life, Fenton Johnson was profiling the homes and studios he visited of various solitary artists. As the...
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A Story That Won’t Behave: Talking with Molly Wizenberg
“I’d wanted so much to have a story that behaved, but instead I have a self,” writes Molly Wizenberg toward the end of her searching new memoir, The Fixed Stars. The misbehaving story in question...
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Milked
I never noticed my breasts when they were round, fleshy, and upright. They were parts of me: a complete being. I notice them, now, when I step out of the shower. My self-image has fractured, narrowed...
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Against Respectability: A Conversation with Raven Leilani
Raven Leilani is a writer we should all be reading. In her stellar debut novel, Luster, we follow Edie, a sex-positive twenty-something Black woman, through a complicated series of events (both...
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Diaspora, Reconstructed
The most I’ve seen of Kashmir is from videos my father took in the ’90s, visiting his birthplace shortly after marrying my mother. My favorite is less than a minute long: a field of yellow flowers, the...
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