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

Open your mouth. Not too wide. You’ll want no tension in the throat. All the muscles should be relaxed. Just let your jaw hang there, a limp slick of bone. Run the backs of your hands along your ...

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 ...

Laurie Ann Guerrero turns to needlework and embroidery as both artistic practice and poetic language in REDWORK (Autumn House Press, 2026), winner of the 2025 Autumn House Poetry Prize. The collection ...

An archivist first recommended I read Doireann Ní Ghríofa. I was interested in writing a counter-history for Joan Vollmer, a literary figure who was murdered by her husband, the writer William S.

Do you remember us? We were parked on the side of the road when you stopped. You were young, my mother’s age, maybe twenty-five, wearing a white T-shirt and baseball cap. You lowered your head enough ...

Makenna Goodman’s novel, Helen of Nowhere (Coffee House Press, 2025), begins with a discredited academic bemoaning the downward spiral of his career and blaming the women in his life. When he decides ...

Dystopian survival amidst environmental breakdown. Violent conflicts over fresh water and arable land. Total societal collapse. Most of today’s climate fiction focuses on impending doom, but Kawai ...

On the second week of her administrative leave, in that hour of morning after Greg left for work, when Aleena, too, should be fighting highway traffic but was instead grounded at home feeling strange ...

The October installment of the relaunch The Rumpus Book Club* will be on October 26th at 7pm ET. Host Debbie Millman will be speaking with New York Times best-selling author Min Jin Lee about her ...

The Rumpus publishes original fiction, poetry, literary humor writing, comics, essays, book reviews, and interviews with authors and artists of all kinds. Our mostly volunteer-run magazine strives to ...