Bartman: Reading books is one of the great joys of my life, and interpreting a book into visual language that, in some way, ...

Convulsing, she asks, “Who’s gonna save me?” The plea repeats in different pitches until she is left lying prone, still ...

Yiyun Li writes love stories. In her latest novel, Music Against the Night (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2026) —as in past novels, the author’s short fiction, and memoir writing—she explores several kinds ...

A decade ago, in my first year of teaching high school English, I was required to teach The Odyssey to ninth-graders. My only other interaction with the epic poem was when I read it in high school, ...

“Be curious, not judgmental.” So says Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) in a beloved moment of the hit Apple TV series. In the scene, the excessively American Ted gallantly accepts a bet from the Richmond ...

One of the key benefits of paid Rumpus membership is access to our book club recordings after the fact. Moving forward, we will post these monthly, but to catch up, here are the recordings to date.

About halfway into Wendy S. Walters’s new book, A Dead White: An Argument Against White Paint (Scribner, 2026), the author writes about encountering a fellow writer at a literary festival who asks her ...

There is no use speaking in tongues this year.

The October installment of the relaunch The Rumpus Book Club* is tonight at 7pm ET. Host Debbie Millman will be speaking with New York Times best-selling author Min Jin Lee about her brand new book ...

a baby made dead before even conceived, born still if born at all. I wanted to doubt. As our baby crept toward viability, dead baby birds kept appearing in the driveway. The baby bird’s body soft ...

I am going to change the subject this week (again!), but first I wanted to thank you for your absolute banger of a response to my breakdown piece. You somehow always know how to call me out in a way ...

They were making love in the grass, real grass that had first been grown from sod, transported from a garden store in the suburbs, then hoisted on a cherry-picker and installed atop a corporate coffee ...