First Comes Love…
Over at the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman explores how men and women authors write about marriage. Citing examples from Leo Tolstoy, Jane Austen, Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, and many others,...
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One Hundred Thousand Miles
This is how stuff sneaks up on you. You take your battered bicycle to the shop and tell the repair guy you know it’s heavy and unsexy and doesn’t even really count as a mountain bike anymore, but you...
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Dear McSweeney’s: Two Letters from Stephen Elliott
Below we’ve reprinted two letters written by Rumpus Founder and Editor-in-Chief Stephen Elliott. The first appeared in McSweeney’s Issue 12, published in November 2003, and the second appeared on...
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Are We All Our Own Vanishing
We all had a sickness after our brother Scott took his life. We don’t talk about his death and its power over us; rarely do the four of us kids even speak, and we were once a bustling, intimate...
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There Is No Such Thing as a True Story
There is no such thing as a true story.I know this because my daughter insists I told her to put her dirty dishes in the sink when I know I told her to put them in the dishwasher, and because my sister...
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Different Love
“Female homosexuals are somehow more complex to study….”–psychologist Andrea Camperio-Ciani, Journal of Sexual Medicine, 2010Within ten minutes of riding in my colleague’s car, I know she’s a lesbian....
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Frigid
On the Internet, I read that vaginas can stretch to accommodate almost any reasonable thing. Women’s health sites and online magazines and web-based doctors all seem to agree. The vagina, they say, is...
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The Ant and the Grasshopper Can Coexist
I am thrilled to introduce this partnership between The Rumpus and VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts, the only multi-genre summer workshop for writers of color in the US. Founded over fifteen years ago...
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Cat Town
We got Stormy on the day I turned twenty-four, when her two adoptive brothers that we’d gotten from the family next door were about a year old. It was December 27th, and I’d complained for months that...
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Visible: Women Writers of Color #1: Desiree Cooper
“The invisibility of writers of color is in fact a willed blindness. But we exist.”With these words, three Los Angeles–based publishers launched #LitinColor to draw attention to overlooked voices. And...
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The Pool
Fix your gaze on a point on the other side of the swimming pool instead of on your husband or the woman he’s watching. The silver birch at the edge of the fence separating the pool from the parking lot...
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(K)ink #7: Writing While Deviant: Brian Kornell
There’s evidence that D.H. Lawrence enjoyed an erotic power exchange relationship with his wife, that James Joyce was into scat (among other things), and that Oscar Wilde—well, most of us know what...
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A Letter to My Father That He Will Never Read
30 May, 2010The flashlight. The uniforms. The vest. The Kevlar. The extra sets of identification tags. The books that will feverishly breathe and swell just beyond the comforts of fiction, acting as...
View ArticleAblaze with Care
As we said our vows, we were undone. We wept, besotted with our luck.Maggie Nelson, interviewed by Paul Laity for the Guardian, talks about her life before and during her deservedly acclaimed...
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All of the Above
I am thrilled to introduce this partnership between The Rumpus and VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts, the only multi-genre summer workshop for writers of color in the US. Founded by Elmaz Abinader, Junot...
View ArticleThis Week in Short Fiction
If you’re not yet aware of the online magazine Storychord, take this chance to get acquainted. Each issue features a short story, a piece of visual art, and a musical composition, which combine to make...
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The Rumpus Interview with Charles Bock
When I learned Charles Bock had written a new novel, I knew I had to read it, and as soon as I could. My reasons were not entirely leisurely. I had some questions, some serious curiosity.Charles taught...
View ArticleMore Money, (Not) More Problems
In a powerful and anecdotal essay at The Toast, Nicole Chung discusses how money-related anxiety has stayed with her into adulthood, and how disparity between her and her husband’s attitudes toward...
View ArticleVoices of Addiction #1: Baby’s Home
My baby wants to come home… home. She’s an adult now, in her twenties, and she’s been on the streets again for most of the last year. I’ve seen her twice since last April, both brief visits—one with us...
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Preservation
My husband is posing for a picture, his head wedged inside the jaw of an enormous alligator, his mouth stretched in mock fear. The alligator, stuffed and mounted, squats in an artificial habitat—think...
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