Do Not Look Away
Why are we afraid? Because in the two days since the election was called, there have been numerous accounts of harassment and violence, motivated by racism, homophobia, and sexism. These events are...
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United We Stand
Across the country and around the world, people have joined together to protest against President-elect Donald Trump and all that his campaign has stood for. These protests serve to unify, to bring...
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The Digital Dictator
I have existed from the morning of the world and I shall exist until the last star falls from the night –Roman emperor Gaius Caligula (AD 12–AD 41).Part of the beauty of me is that I am very rich....
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This October Sunday
This story begins in my mother’s third-grade classroom on a Thursday afternoon in October, 1963. I’m there waiting for her to finish the work she has to do after her pupils have gone—write lesson...
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This Week in Books: The Red Hijab
Welcome to This Week in Books, a new Rumpus column that will highlight books just released by small and independent presses.Books are more important than ever. As we head into a Trump presidency, we’re...
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Voices of Addiction #7: The Only Thing That Has to Change Is Everything
We both smoked Marlboro Lights. We chain smoked them, too, talking in between drags, the cherries on the end of our cigarettes glowing like tiny meteors in the darkness. John inhaled deeply, blew the...
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The Last Book I Loved: So Long, See You Tomorrow
One winter in rural Virginia, where I grew up, there was a terrible tragedy in our small town. The mother of a well-known student from the local high school was run over and killed by a speeding, drunk...
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The Rumpus Interview with Roxane Gay
Roxane Gay is a force. In the past six years, she has had five major works come out—a novel (An Untamed State), two short story collections (Ayiti and Difficult Women), an essay collection (Bad...
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The Rumpus Interview with Dawn Lundy Martin
In November 2015, the Miami-based literary arts organization Reading Queer brought a group of queer-identified writers to present their work at a series of events co-sponsored by the Miami Book Fair...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #67: Anuradha Roy
A tranquil beach town named Jarmuli is the setting of Anuradha Roy’s third novel, Sleeping on Jupiter, which won the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature and made the longlist for the 2015 Man Booker...
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The Future of Body Horror: Can Our Art Keep up with Our Suffering?
x. You see, what we’re talkin’ about here is an organism that imitates other life-forms, and it imitates ‘em perfectly. –Dr. Blair, The Thing John Carpenter’s The Thing opens with the desolation of...
View ArticleMultitudes #3: Policing Black Art
We are pleased to announce Multitudes, a new column at The Rumpus, which will feature the work of writers of color, actively seeking underrepresented voices and perspectives. We hope that the writers...
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The Rumpus Interview with Viet Thanh Nguyen
When I first learned that Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen and I shared the same hometown of San Jose, California, and that we both grew up there in the 1970s and ‘80s, I knew I had to...
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The Rumpus Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell
I discovered Bonnie Jo Campbell’s first novel, Q Road, shortly after leaving my teens. Like Rachel Crane, the teenage protagonist of Q Road, I lived on a farm, worked with animals, threw hay bales,...
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The Storming Bohemian Punks the Muse #21: Not Yesterday’s Demonstrations
1972: War was waging in Vietnam and kids were coming home in boxes. Hippes and yippies went clean for Gene McCarthy, but George McGovern won the democratic nomination. Tricky Dick Nixon was the one for...
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Interrogating the English Language with Safiya Sinclair
I remember Safiya Sinclair from my time at Bennington College, though I’m sure she doesn’t remember me. She was one of the serious literature students who graduated my freshman year. I’ve kept up with...
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The Evolution of a Trigger
Dirty fingernails. They were gnawed-down and greased like the nails of a mechanic. That was all I could see of the stranger as he flicked off the light switch. He was about my height, maybe a hundred...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 1
My children are asleep in the next room as I write this. We are in Claremont, CA. It’s a quiet place in a very noisy part of the world. Just outside of Los Angeles. The lights and sirens and perpetual...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 2
I saw the violence in the eyes of my uncles when they took off their shirts in preparation for a fight. At picnics the shirts came off. And when working in the front yard. And in the parking lots...
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The Rumpus Saturday Essay: The Savage Mind, Pt. 3
White people were scared of us. And they loathed us. These things were not in question any more than the fact that our neighbors didn’t know or understand the first thing about us—about what Stacey...
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