Possibility Is Spellbinding: The Lightness by Emily Temple
2020 was a year of heaviness. COVID-19 ravaged our country. The Black Lives Matter movement protested long-standing police brutality and systemic racism. China interred Uighurs in concentration camps....
View ArticleHaunted by Hoax: Paul Griner’s The Book of Otto and Liam
Paul Griner’s new novel, The Book of Otto and Liam, opens with Otto Barnes, a thirty-something freelance artist, getting pulled over. He’d been following a route mapped out precisely three years before...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Tangible Darkness
“What time was I born?” Yashar asks his father. “4:45.” “It’s 4:22 now. So in half an hour, I’m six. Right?” “That’s right.” “How old are you?” “Thirty-four.” “Are you ten times older than me?”...
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Nodding to the Unknowable: A Conversation with Theodore Wheeler
Nebraska and domestic drama probably aren’t things you think about when you think about September 11th and government surveillance. And yet Omaha is primarily where Theodore Wheeler has set his new...
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Sleeping with Myself
fire ants course through the forest to eviscerate a carcass, this bite of time following that next one following on: the heart and the lungs and the intestines, winding themselves down the dark...
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Unprepared Blue Birds
Birds Leading a funeral is like trying to corral a flock of stunned birds who have all just flown into the same window. Cigarettes I wanted to enjoy knowing something my sister didn’t know. The...
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Cooped
Just before it all begins, the dog gets out of the house and kills one of our chickens. He shakes her until she goes soft and limp and then he drops her body on the ground. My husband gets rid of the...
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The Gothic Horror of the Fourth Trimester: Talking with Julia Fine
Julia Fine’s new novel, The Upstairs House, is a ghost story about a new mother being haunted by beloved children’s book author, Goodnight Moon, Margaret Wise Brown. I was sold on this deliciously...
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Voices on Addiction: Family Tree
I’m the first in a long line of resilient Midwestern women not to marry an alcoholic, but to become one. The shadow in the veins of the men in my life slid for generations through both bloodlines and...
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Allowing for Breathing Room: A Conversation with Jessica Lind Peterson
Jessica Lind Peterson’s debut essay collection, Sound Like Trapped Thunder, opens in a treehouse. This treehouse is a frame without walls. Cold air and creatures come in. It evokes a lofty structure,...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Boy of My Dreams
I cannot stop dreaming about the sixteen-year-old boy I loved madly almost twenty years ago. We met on the beach during a hot, limitless summer, but we did not consummate our relationship because my...
View ArticleLanguage Is the Spell: Kathryn Nuernberger’s The Witch of Eye
“I’m committed to believing women,” Kathryn Nuernberger writes toward the end of a book that begins by identifying women with the earth—both of them similarly at the mercy of a patriarchal paradigm. “I...
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Reimagining the Whole Damn World: A Conversation with Sonora Jha
Feminism, like yoga, is a practice, and perfection is an illusion. Novelist, critic, and essayist Sonora Jha and I met in the Seattle writing community. Once, we were invited to sit on a panel together...
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Claiming Our Untold Stories: Talking with Gina Frangello
That Gina Frangello survived the past decade is astonishing; that she’s also emerged from the challenges of the past decade with one of this year’s best memoirs is miraculous. The experience of reading...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Notes Toward the End of the World
The train to the end of the world has looped back to Reykjavik so the professor of Icelandic studies can leave. We watch him from the window, his tweed jacket curled over his trouser belt, waving off...
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Voices on Addiction: Searching for Lilacs
I was convinced that if I could just find lilacs for my mother—a big bundle on woody stems, wrapped in white paper the way the French do it—that she would know how much I loved her. That all the...
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He’s Funny That Way
The first verse settles in slowly. Bob Dylan’s scratchy croon leads a piano and strings while Peter and I sway in each other’s arms. Our backdrop, a wall of beer barrels, rises above a wood-slatted...
View ArticleA Love That Leaves Scars: With Teeth by Kristen Arnett
Picture this: You’re driving down a Florida highway. It’s nighttime, although if you put the windows down, you’d never know. The air is hot and heavy, sits on you like an old dog would: completely....
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Rumpus Exclusive: Cover Reveal for Flight Risk
We are thrilled to bring you this exclusive first look at the cover of Joy Castro’s new novel, Flight Risk, forthcoming from Lake Union Publishing on November 1, 2021. Isabel Morales is a successful...
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