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The Last Book I Loved: nineties by Lucy Ives
“I am starting to figure out that what it is is I like to play with fate.”***When I was thirteen years old, I was caught shoplifting. There was a rash of girls my age who all regarded shoplifting as a...
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The Rumpus Saturday Essay: Stain
One summer afternoon when I was twelve, I walked my dog a bit further than usual and we ended up under the viaduct where I-75 crossed above our heads. It was so dark under the metal bridge that I...
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Being Like Him: Fathers, Daughters, and Sons in Boyhood
In 2004, when my dad was slowly dying from a calcifying heart valve, I listened to Wolf Parade’s seminal album Apologies to the Queen Mary while I drove across state lines to my job at a domestic...
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The Saturday Rumpus Review: Little Minnie at the Movies
How do you write about a film that is getting universal acclaim when you’re mourning the potential of a movie that could have been?The Diary of a Teenage Girl places me in this curious conundrum. The...
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#OscarsSoWhite: Calling Out Academy Bias
This isn’t the first dance between the Oscars and irrelevance, and this celebratory pat on the back could use a star-studded slap to the face.#OscarsSoWhite strikes again with the cringe-worthiness of...
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The Rumpus Interview with Annie DeWitt
Few writers can assemble a sentence with the elegance of Annie DeWitt, whose work I first fell for in the pages of NOON a couple of years ago. To be more accurate, my admiration arrived in the ear, as...
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: We Be Bleeding
1. Commercials instruct us that our period should be blue. That we can be contained in scented pads. That wings will make us fly. These are lies. It will be red like your skinned knee after having...
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Allowing a Female to Own Her Genius: Talking with Alana Massey
I was introduced to Alana Massey’s writing via her 2014 essay, “You’re Right, I Didn’t Eat That,” a meditation on her compulsive pursuit of thinness and the emotional and physical toll it exacts on...
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In Between the In-Between: Talking with Jenny Zhang
On the first page of the first story in poet Jenny Zhang’s debut story collection, Sour Heart, the nine-year-old narrator Cristina writes about waking up to find roaches had crawled onto her body as...
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Visitations: Gwendolyn Brooks at One Hundred
I. For at least two months, I have been haunted by Gwendolyn Brooks. Haunted in all of the best ways. First it was the collection of critical writings about Brooks. Then the issue of Poetry Magazine....
View ArticleOde to Girlhood: Olivia Gatwood’s Life of the Party
Last summer, around the time when Olivia Gatwood’s Life of the Party was published in New York, I was sleeping on friends’ couches in Tel Aviv. It was my annual homeland visit from Chicago, and I was...
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This Is Joy: A Conversation with Gabrielle Civil
When Gabrielle Civil enters a room, someone might start crawling on the table. At least, this is what happened when she spoke with a class I was teaching one semester, via Skype, after asking us to...
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What to Read When 2021 Is Just Around the Corner
It’s true that 2020 was a year that challenged all of us in so very many ways, but it was also a banner year for reading (find some of our favorite books from the year here and here). While we know...
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What to Read When You Don’t Know If You Can Go Home Again
In these disunited states, containing within them many sovereign nations, we are in what Biodun Jeyifo called “arrested decolonization.” And yet, as Mukoma Wa Ngugi wrote, “The work of decolonization...
View ArticleWhat We’re Reading in March!
We’re thrilled to share that our March Book Club selection is Melissa Febos’s new essay collection Girlhood, forthcoming from Bloomsbury on March 30, but available to Rumpus Book Club members in just a...
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project: Forsyth Harmon
Forsyth Harmon is a writer of clean, precise sentences and an illustrator with an eye for the perfect evocative detail. She is author of the illustrated novel Justine, out this week from Tin House...
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What to Read When You Want to Celebrate Women’s History
March is Women’s History Month, and while we celebrate women’s history year-round at The Rumpus, we wanted to share a list of books written exclusively by women and genderqueer authors this month. We...
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Everything Must Change: A Conversation with Melissa Febos
“We get to live for a while inside that new life,” Melissa Febos writes in the last essay, “Les Calanques,” in her new essay collection, Girlhood. When she arrives in Cassis, France, she writes of...
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Melissa Febos
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Melissa Febos about her new essay collection, Girlhood (Bloomsbury, March 2021), letting the book have its own life out in the world, learning to trust and be patient...
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Sketch Book Reviews: Girlhood by Melissa Febos
Girlhood, written by Melissa Febos and released on March 30, 2021 from Bloomsbury, is a gripping set of essays about the forces that shape young girls and the adults they become. Throughout the...
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