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A Japanese Heart
Zak, I am happy that you can attend my wedding as the best man. As we discussed the other day, it is very important that you behave appropriately with my bride’s family and her guests. People will...
View ArticleFive Stages of Prince Fandom
Stage 1: You Got the LookPrince and you are the same height, so you both look good in cropped jackets. Because it is the mid ’80s, you have collected an unholy number of cropped jackets, enough to...
View ArticleMy Life with Annie Lennox #4: Honestly
Annie Lennox’s Bare album dropped the year before I graduated college. It was 2003. The US and UK were bombing the shit out of Iraq and Madonna had french-kissed Britney Spears at the Video Music...
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Reading Mademoiselle Gantrel
Mademoiselle Gantrel appears in my mind from time to time, snow-capped and distant, like the Alps. Arriving at our house at Smith College for evening cocktails, she stamps snow from her high leather...
View ArticleThe Saturday Rumpus Essay: Instructions for Replicating a Bad Summer
MORE LIKE SUMMER BREAKUPWaking up too hot on humid mornings, I’d climb out onto the roof and watch the empty campus, the silent smooth paths, the gray-blue New England slate beautiful for no one. The...
View ArticleA Literary Homecoming
Author Matthew Neill Null writes at Catapult about a college class on Central Europe that changed the course of his reading and writing life:My new professor, with his reading list of Central and...
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Rapture of the Deep
First I will say this: I did it for a man. I attempted to learn how to breathe underwater because a man I loved asked me if I would. I will also say that I sometimes have difficulty breathing and these...
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Out of Order
Surgical Center, October 18, 8 p.m.It felt like I’d been trying to open my eyes for hours. Only I couldn’t. The lights above my bed shone far too brightly, and infinitesimal shifts shot pain through my...
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Visible: Women Writers of Color #3: Cole Lavalais
Cole Lavalais’s arresting debut novel, The Summer of the Cicadas, engages with a mother-daughter relationship, mental health, and first love, set on the campus of small black college in the South. The...
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Bring It
Six inches of snow had accumulated by the time I took Omar, my golden retriever, for a walk. Early in the three-mile loop of my subdivision, I saw the lanky figure of my neighbor Jack shoveling his...
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The Commune
In a big, beautiful brownstone in Fort Greene live seven people who used to be strangers. They call it a cooperative house.On the day I moved in, I mistakenly called it a “commune.” I was all sweaty...
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The Name Before My Name
“How about Dorothy?” Cecile asked me.Under the bright fluorescent lights in the high school library, I blinked at her. “Do I look like a Dorothy to you?”“No, I suppose not.”For some time I had craved a...
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A Case, Diagnosis, and Its Findings
This year, in the days before the diagnosis, while I dragged myself from appointment to appointment, my husband, Preston, ambled along with me. He brought books to read in the waiting room. He called...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Mandarin Imperial
It was the summer before I left for college, and Aunt Minda was cutting ties with us. She called me to her office where she uncapped a metal tea canister, drew a small, tight square of paper from...
View ArticleThe Sunday Rumpus Essay: Distance Devotion
For a brief spell as a teenager, I dreamed of suffering. What I wanted, more than anything, was to become an Olympic distance swimmer, one of the scrappy elite who distinguished themselves through...
View ArticleSongs of Our Lives: Stereolab’s “Pause”
I.A light May rain fell on my face as I woke; predawn light smudged the field where, the night before, we’d dragged our sleeping bags to study the stars. Under that silvery light we’d held hands and...
View Article“Our Parents Wouldn’t Let Us”: The Death of Liberal Arts
The liberal arts are shrinking fast on college campuses, and for one simple reason: parents don’t want their kids to have liberal arts degrees. For the Washington Post, Steven Pearlstein, Professor of...
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Trouble in Mind
I.Like many white girls in days of yore, I was taken with Bonnie Raitt’s covers of traditional blues songs about male sexual conquest with the inverted gender references that meant she was singing...
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Wanted/Needed/Loved #12: Thao Nguyen’s Release
The thing I want to talk about is something I’m not in possession of anymore, but of all the things I’ve lost it’s the thing I think about the most. It’s a patch that had my dad’s name on it from his...
View ArticleDiversity for the Campus Novel
At Ploughshares, Bryan Washington explores the lack of racial diversity in the “campus novel” genre, where the students rebelling against their educational establishments are still overwhelmingly...
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