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True Romantic #7: The Bright Hot Center of the Universe
As a child, The Magician—whose given name was Marius—trained to play in the International Frederick Chopin Piano Competition in Poland. I’d never heard of the competition until I met Marius, but for...
View ArticleBringing Up Baby
Shirley Jackson’s bone-chilling story “The Lottery” is probably the last thing anyone wants to associate with Mother’s Day, yet her lurking plot twists and sharp character insights are the perfect...
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The Rumpus Interview with Shulem Deen
In 2005, 30-year-old Shulem Deen was summoned to a nighttime meeting with religious leaders in his small Hasidic Jewish enclave of New Square, in upstate New York. The leaders of the Skver Hasidic sect...
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True Romantic #8: Too Good To Be True
For the first few months of our relationship, I couldn’t understand what Marius saw in me. His first wife had been a model, but I didn’t care much about clothes. I was more interested in poetry than...
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: When You Dream Your Husband Is Trying to Kill You
I want to say it was a just a bad dream, that I don’t believe my husband is trying to kill me, or any part of me. When I tell friends about the nightmare, anticipating their dead pause, I laugh first...
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True Romantic #9: The Deep End of the Swimming Pool
“Promise me something,” The Magician said one morning over coffee.“Anything,” I said, meeting his eye.“Tell me you’ll never leave me.” The problem with his visa had unsettled him. He’d become obsessed...
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Tamara Winfrey-Harris
I’ve long been impressed with Tamara Winfrey-Harris‘s incisive essays, which I started reading a few years ago on her blog, What Tami Said. Tamara specializes in the intersection of race and gender...
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True Romantic #10: A Small Black Velvet Box
A number of surprises awaited me when we arrived in Sofia in May 2002.First, I learned that Marius’s visa situation was much more complicated than we had originally believed. It turned out that his J-1...
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True Romantic #11: To Find a Rainbow
It was at the twelve-week prenatal exam that we learned we would be having a baby boy.If anyone had asked me at the time, I would have said the usual mantra pregnant mothers chant: As long as it’s...
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True Romantic #12: A Strange Feeling
In the beginning months of our time in Bulgaria, we lived in Marius’s house, a big place that Yana and Ivan had given him as a wedding present for his first marriage. The house wasn’t in Sofia itself,...
View ArticleA Different Kind of Spinster
I’m in my 30s and haven’t married yet, but marriage is not in my own top five questions and hasn’t been for some time. I’m much more interested in whether I’ll write a book or have kids, and much more...
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True Romantic #13: God or Fate or Whatever
The contractions started too soon. I was walking up the stairs of the apartment in Izgrev, Adam’s hand in mine, and the wall of muscles in my abdomen locked up, hard and tight, as if a belt were...
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True Romantic #14: On Hold
Marius came back from Izgrev with a container of curry and rice, some chocolate, and a case of bottled water. He’d filled a suitcase with extra clothes, some books and a blanket. He handed me his...
View ArticleA Long Engagement
Depending how you look at it, Angie and I were engaged for eight months or eleven and a half years.Depending when you asked us, we were anti-marriage, resentful of marriage, indifferent to marriage, or...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Lera
Lera knew something was wrong when she saw the door. It bent into the hallway like a dislocated finger. Behind it, a line of white light shivered out. Her body understood what had happened before her...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Across the Divide
Long before more modernized versions of sisterhood were showcased on HBO television shows such as Sex and the City and Girls, there was the 1988 film Beaches. When I was a teenager I used to watch it...
View ArticleWeekly Geekery
Is your ad blocker hurting publications?New technology. New crimes. All of our friends are on the Twitter.“Beep bop beep,” is “I do” in robot.Related Posts:Weekly GeekeryWeekly GeekeryWeekly...
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True Romantic #15: Division of Labor
Emma was born in the middle of a cold January night in Maichin Dom. She came into the world with one sharp cry, a beautiful and pitch-perfect sound that sliced through the silent delivery room. Marius...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Sword and Her Sister
A baby is on my breast, I am balancing a book on my knee, and the two year-old is watching Frozen for the fifteenth time because she’s enchanted and I am on maternity leave in a polar vortex. It is...
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True Romantic #16: Mistakes and Memory Lapses
“So at night, when Emma wakes up, I’ll feed her and let you rock her back to sleep,” I suggested.“No,” Marius replied. “I’d like to feed her.Emma was breastfeeding, and while Marius was equipped to...
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