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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Kill Bob
When I was 15 years old, I came to associate evil with a jean-jacketed, gray-haired, man-monster. His name was Bob and although his rapes and murders of young women were restricted to the all-too-real...
View ArticleMy Mother Would Be Right
But seeing them beating that man on television, it must have scared me so deep, in a place so hidden, that I didn’t even know about it. My brain kept playing as though I were a regular teenager. But my...
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Sarah Hepola
Sarah Hepola is the personal essays editor at Salon. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, The New Republic, Slate, Glamour, the Guardian, and The Morning News, where she has been a...
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The Saturday Rumpus Review: Mad Max: Fury Road
Who killed the world?My favorite detail in Mad Max: Fury Road is the fact that this question ultimately goes unanswered. This film deeply critiques masculinity, and many feminist critics have, somewhat...
View ArticleKill Them All
Arielle Bernstein, Rumpus Film/TV/Media and Saturday Editor, writes about Rihanna, bitches, and blood over at Salon:Women are raised on images of toxic masculinity just like the men around us are. Many...
View ArticleWalking Through Violence
Walking straight into violence was nothing new to me. I’d learned how to walk deliberately and unflinchingly into violence from my father, like so many other children do in this country.In fact, in...
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Last Chance out of Jonestown
We huddled around a wrecked man, getting as close to him as we could. This was in men’s group, sometime during my first week in rehab. All of us—say eleven or twelve withdrawal machines—surrounded Mort...
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The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Gira Grant
A few hours after I met with Melissa Gira Grant in a Brooklyn coffee roastery this past March, she published this FAQ on her website for other writers requesting interviews with her.“Would it be useful...
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The Rumpus Interview with Matt Bell
Matt Bell is a busy man. He writes and publishes, teaches, and reads voraciously. Just this year, he’s released two books: Baldur’s Gate II: Shadows of Amn (June 2015), a rumination both on his...
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The Rumpus Interview with Garth Risk Hallberg
At the center of City on Fire’s first act is a shooting of a young woman in Central Park on New Year’s Eve. The man unlucky enough to discover her wounded, unconscious body is Mercer Goodman, a recent...
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1 + 1 = 3
I’ve never been satisfied with my place in life.In the wild, a natural hierarchy reigns: the weaker, the smaller submit to the big and strong. Alpha gorilla stands to beat his chest, and all the king’s...
View ArticleThe Sunday Rumpus Essay: The Story of My Fear Over Time
You’d think the flat stretch of American highway across the western desert would be safe, but there’s a woman behind the wheel whose stories live inside her guts and muscle, the very ligaments and...
View ArticlePoetry As Propaganda
Oxford academic Elisabeth Kendall has found that poetry may be a major recruitment tool for militant jihadis in the Middle East. Although poetry is often sidelined in Western cultures, it is still...
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American Ambiguity
History is a catalogue of inciting incidents. So too is memory, the retrospective narratives of culture and the individual. Whether history or memory comes to climax is beside the point, because they...
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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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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Blood-Red Bougainvillea
The phone rang in the dark—my boyfriend. Well, my ex-boyfriend now. My baby’s father. Lance.“Good news,” he laughed into the phone. “Good news and a hundred dollars!” He started singing that Clash song...
View ArticleThis Week in Short Fiction
This is supposed to be a story.This is the first sentence of “The Alive Sister,” a powerful new work of flash fiction by Megan Giddings published at The Offing on Monday. In it, two little black girls...
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The Conversation: Joshua Bennett and Camonghne Felix
The Conversation is an eight-part series put together by Aziza Barnes and Nabila Lovelace and hosted by The Rumpus. Read more about the project here. These poems and conversations from Joshua Bennett...
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The Conversation: Jayson Smith and A. H. Jerriod Avant
The Conversation is an eight-part series put together by Aziza Barnes and Nabila Lovelace and hosted by The Rumpus. Read more about the project here. These poems and conversations from Jayson Smith and...
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Jay Deshpande
Jay Deshpande’s much-anticipated first collection of poems, Love the Stranger, was released in 2015 by YesYes Books and quickly devoured by the poetry community. Deshpande was dubbed one of the “10...
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