The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
Happy Sunday! I’m in upstate New York at my sister’s college graduation. She’s really smart, like Phi Beta Kappa smart. However, she’s insisting that I play drinking games with her, which I haven’t...
View ArticleReagan’s “Welfare Queen” Was Real and Terrifying
Ronald Reagan’s anecdotal speech about a “welfare queen” who bilked taxpayers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars has largely been discredited as racist demagoguery, but it turns out that...
View ArticleProfiling Roxane Gay
Tim Obaro profiles Rumpus Essays Editor Roxane Gay and looks at her debut novel, An Untamed State, for Chicago Magazine. The novel follows a middle-class newlywed kidnapped while on vacation in Haiti....
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The Rumpus Interview with Lacy M. Johnson
In her stunning memoir The Other Side, Lacy M. Johnson tells the story of being held prisoner in a soundproofed basement of her ex-boyfriend’s apartment. Though the violence in her book is easy to...
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The Rumpus Interview with Susan Minot
Susan Minot’s first book, Monkeys, was published in 1986, and she produced another book every three to five years like clockwork. That is, until, the dozen-year gap between her last one, Rapture and...
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Majik Market
1.It was the stretch past Hawaii Drive North and Mindanao along an empty field that made the three mile walk to and from the Majik Market seem, on particularly hot days, hardly worth the effort even...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Bellevonia Beautee
Every morning Andrew fetches her breakfast. This is just a recent thing, as I’ve seen him reading in a book that it is vital to treat your woman kind. Something special at least every day, a little...
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from Matthew Gallaway’s #gods
The Abduction of Europa Helen was born one year before me, to the day. I don’t know why or how my parents decided to have us so close together—if it was even a decision—but we were almost twins. We...
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TORCH: The Reunion
My half-brother was two years old when he was kidnapped by his father and taken to the US from Guatemala. I wouldn’t be born until three years later. The loss would nestle itself at the cellular level...
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The Thread: Near Miss
In 1991, I was ten years old. I lived in a tiny, picturesque mountain town on the north shore of Lake Tahoe—the kind of place with a definable “tourist season,” the kind of place where “nothing” ever...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: The Witch House
I’m not saying polyamory can’t work after you have kids. I’m just saying it stopped working for me. I didn’t want another lover. I just wanted someone to help with the dishes. Even in our hip little...
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An Exploration of Belonging: Talking with Donna Hemans
Jamaica-born writer Donna Hemans has been said to hear “life sung by a chorus, not a single voice.” Her plots are as intense as thrillers yet as resonant as poetry, and the lyricism and emotional...
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