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Hold On to What You’ve Got
In seventh grade, Heather was the new girl in school. She was chubby and bookish and wore weird, gaudy clothing—denim hats covered in puff-paint flowers, neon orange skeleton earrings that dangled to...
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The Prophecy
There was the butterfly knife. The idea of it, not the thing in reality—sleek, wicked-edged, the same kind of knife you once asked to borrow because you were walking home alone and you wanted to be the...
View ArticleThe Rumpus Review of Boyhood
Boyhood opens on six-year-old Mason looking up at the sky. The lens rests easy on his face, focusing our attention on a kid who has an obvious curiosity about the world. He’s waiting to be picked up...
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My Nixon Years
40 years ago I saw my father and grandmother argue. It was the first and only time, as far as I know. My father had been his mother’s favorite child—a fact acknowledged with some bitterness by his...
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In My Clothes
My aunt sews matching dresses for me and my cousin; she buys the patterns, and when she makes my cousin a dress she often makes me the same. The dresses are wonderful. I do not know much about sewing,...
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Behind the Caves
“Only connect.”—E. M. Forster At my 20-year high school reunion I learned that the most popular girl in school—the Queen—had married one of the Hoods. How had this happened?Everything felt mysterious....
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Stars Hollow, Revisited
Friday nights, Rory Gilmore visits her grandparents in Hartford, Connecticut. She brings her single mother, Lorelai, who had her at sixteen, and whom she mothers now. Emily Gilmore—all WASP reserve and...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Transparent and the Evolving Culture of Shame
In Transparent, during an early scene with their1 eldest child, Mort is sitting on a bed, trying to explain something difficult for a daughter to understand. Negotiating her own confusion, Sarah asks,...
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The Full Moon
I’m still not sure of the chain of events that led to it, but my friends and I, about 8th grade, began to show our asses. I mean this literally—riding to school with our older brothers or sitting at...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Out on the Coast
According to the Stillboro County Citizens’ Almanac, reissued with addenda every couple of years between 1912 and 1988, the whale that washed up on shore and came to cover most of the Northeastern...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Shameless
2000 was the year of my Bat Mitzvah and my first time away at camp. It was also the year of Oops!… I Did It Again, Britney Spears’s wildly successful second album, and her first scandal at MTV’s Video...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Wanting To Dance
“So let’s give them a big hand and make them feel real welcome. YAAAAY!” Kermit yelled, waving his green felt arms wildly. The curtain is pulled to reveal a band of bugs, or beetles, who begin to play,...
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Remembering Molly
Vinnie Dombroski screams through my car speakers: On your note is my reply, I wished I loved you… Don’t ask why. Sponge’s song “Molly (Sixteen Candles Down the Drain)” is a dualistic post-grunge...
View ArticleWhen Does a Writer Grow Up?
The Atlantic examines adulthood and how we get there, including a close look at the life of a writer:Henry published his first book…when he was 31 years old, after 12 years of changing jobs and...
View ArticleGoodbye, Starman
I’ll start with a confession: I first discovered David Bowie in the same unromantic way most kids of my generation did: on commercial rock radio. There’s so much I’ve learned since then about how...
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David Biespiel’s Poetry Wire: Primal Talk
Most nights, usually late, after everyone was back in the apartment on Glenville Ave., friends would wander up into the apartment, too, and the kitchen would become a room of talk. More than a room. It...
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...
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Goddesses
Although I never met her, I am told my great grandmother, Basantamayi, was a deeply religious woman. According to my grandfather, she and her husband, my great grandfather Bipin Chandra, lived in...
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On Playing Games, Productivity, and Right Livelihood
One week last spring I said it out loud for the first time: “Sometimes I play so long, my fingers go numb.”I said it while straddling the man I loved. We were fully clothed, on my bed, in my newly...
View ArticleAlbums of Our Lives: Scissor Sisters’s Night Work
When Scissor Sisters’s Night Work came out during the summer of 2010, I was working at the mall—again. It probably wasn’t the night work Jake Shears was singing about, but music generously allows...
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