The fiction of German writer Clemens Meyer first came to English in 2011, in Katy Derbyshire’s translation of his story collection All the Lights. Since then, she has ferried many of his other works across the Germanic divide: his sophomore novel, Bricks and Mortar, was longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize and won the Straelener Translation Prize. A later collection of stories, Dark Satellites, appeared in 2021. But While We Were Dreaming (Fitzcarraldo, 2023), Meyer’s celebrated debut novel, first published in Germany in 2006 and written in a slang-slung and clipped variety of urban German ..read more

Throughout a collection of poems about made-up, dreamed, stolen, and sought-after paintings, Arthur Kayzakian craftily explores themes of violence, loss, love, and dreamworlds in his debut The Book of Redacted Paintings (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), the inaugural recipient of the Black Lawrence immigrant writing series award. The speaker, a varied persona of an “unknown” artist, examines the “small tortures,” including thoughts of suicide, offering hope to those who suffer from anxiety, depression, or complex PTSD when the thoughts no longer intrude. The book begins: “Today I haven’t thought a ..read more

American Precariat is composed of individual essays, each edited by incarcerated writers, situated within societal structures of exclusion, scarcity, and criminality. The breadth of experiences documented—navigating exclusionary elite educational spaces, carceral psychiatric institutions, homelessness among trans youth, immense student loan debt—foregrounds how various and often invisible extreme instability can be. A rendering of the present moment told from below, American Precariat shares stories of the unseen and the unspoken and articulates the lines of our division. In doing so, it offe ..read more

Twice a month, The Rumpus brings your favorite writers directly to your IRL mailbox via our Letters in the Mail program. December 1 LITM Molly Crabapple Our next letter in the mail comes from the archive. Artist, journalist, and author Molly Crabapple writes to us from a corner of a world complicated by war and borders. She explores the part-domesticated, part-wild street cats that roam Istanbul’s neighborhoods, and the strange consistencies they reveal amid a rapidly changing world. Molly Crabapple is an artist and writer based in New York. She is the author of two books, Drawing B ..read more

The valentine cards have it wrong. The heart is a misshapen potato, a red potato if you like, sitting just left of center, ahead of the scapula, caged in by protective ribs. It’s a muscle. Four chambers beating together, like a small VW engine. The vena cava delivers oxygen-depleted blood from the body to the right atrium. The tricuspid valve opens, and blood enters the right ventricle, pumped up and out through the pulmonary artery to the lungs. Pulmonary veins carry oxygenated blood back to the left atrium while the mitral valve opens permitting blood to enter the great pumping chamber, the ..read more

Dear Readers, Since 2021, membership is a crucial part of our funding model. I won’t sugarcoat it: expanding The Rumpus’s membership program to at least 600 members is necessary for us to cover our basic operating costs and continue our mission of publishing risk-taking voices and emerging writers. At a time when many literary magazines have paused or ceased publication, The Rumpus is working hard to make our mostly volunteer-run magazine sustainable while also remaining independent. Advertisers and grants make up only 10% of our funding resources. 90% comes from reader support in the forms ..read more

Like so many adoptees, Susan Kiyo Ito is curious about the woman who gave birth to her. Through tenacious research of telephone books and phone calls, she finds Yumi, whose reaction is every searching adoptee’s nightmare: a woman furious she has been discovered. In her debut memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere (Mad Creek Books, 2023), Ito explores boundaries and bonds as she searches for, locates, and meets with various members of her birth family, some of whom want to keep her a secret and others who welcome her into their family with open arms. Through it all, Ito, a Japanese American same-race ..read more

Pigeons don’t impress us. (Well, most of us.) Rather than marvel, we shrug at the rock dove’s ubiquity, if we acknowledge their existence at all—encountering them on sidewalks, at bus stops and train stations, and even backyard bird feeders. But what if we revered the resilience of pigeons and their ability to not only carve out an ostensibly meager life in the smallest of crevices but to thrive in spite of the lowliness culturally assigned to them, in spite of what we perceive as their ordinariness or even inferiority? What if underneath all of that, there’s something to which a people could ..read more

Although my case is a “closed adoption,” when I was six my family received a letter from Holt International saying my birthmother comes by often and wants to know how I’m doing. They said my family was not required to respond but if they would be willing, she would like to hear from them. My family wrote two letters and sent photos, once in 1991 and again in 1992. In the letters, my parents wrote that I enjoy writing, singing songs, and drawing pictures. That my pictures have lots of rainbows, hearts, and flowers in them. That I say one day I’m going to be an artist. That I wanted to learn to ..read more

In October and November, Voices on Addiction is partnering with Kitchen Table Literary Arts and its creator, Sheree Greer. Sheree L. Greer founded Kitchen Table Literary Arts (KTLA) in 2014. Having relocated to Tampa Bay after graduate school in Chicago, Sheree was looking for community, namely a community of BIPOC women and femme-identified queer writers who were committed to craft and supporting each other’s work. When she couldn’t find that specific community, she decided to create it. Born from informal writing meetups on her front porch, a local taco spot, and public libraries, KTLA beca ..read more