Japanese-American Zoot-Suiters Subverted Pretty Much Everything
Conflicts between “rowdies” and other prisoners interrupted the daily routines of several, if not all, the camps. At the Gila River camp in Arizona, for instance, the editors of the center’s newspaper...
View ArticleSlow and Steady
It took Gene Oishi 50 years to write his debut novel, a story about Japanese American identity and family during and after World War II. Over at The Nervous Breakdown, Oishi interviews himself about...
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The Rumpus Interview with Jay Rubin
I’m somewhat ashamed to admit I first heard of Jay Rubin, Haruki Murakami’s longtime English translator, after I had finished reading Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of...
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The Rumpus Interview with Sanae Ishida
Sanae Ishida spent years attempting to ignore her creative calling, and trying her best to work in a suit and an office. Ultimately, fending off a need for creative outlet and toiling in a corporate...
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The Ant and the Grasshopper Can Coexist
I am thrilled to introduce this partnership between The Rumpus and VONA/Voices of Our Nations Arts, the only multi-genre summer workshop for writers of color in the US. Founded by Elmaz Abinader, Junot...
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The Slow Fall of the Hot Heroine
In eighth grade, every weekday afternoon was church. Held after Dragonball Z and before Gundam Wing on Cartoon Network’s “Toonami” block. The Sacred Time Slot of Sailor Moon. These were the thirty...
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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 ArticleThis Week in Short Fiction
Some people write about dystopian futures, or reimagined folktales, or ghosts, or science fiction. Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of the upcoming story collection Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone, does...
View ArticleThis Week in Indie Bookstores
Livraria Folha Seca in Rio de Janeiro was told that a sign about two-time medalist Adhemar Ferreira Silva, who passed away in 2001, violated the Olympic Committee’s advertising policies.Reuters...
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Rumpus Original Fiction: Rhino Girl
The first squeal split the air like a fault line, a fracture in the world. It sang across the acacia trees, the veld of bunch grass and thorny bushes. Malaya pushed the bridge of her sunglasses higher...
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The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Chris Santiago
The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Chris Santigo about his new collection Tula, writing a multilingual text, William McKinley and the Phillippine-American War, and the connections between music and...
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The Rumpus Interview with Joe Ide
At fifty-eight, Joe Ide has published his first novel, IQ. It is a mystery crime thriller that Ide based on his own experiences growing up as a child in South Central Los Angeles, and it is inspired by...
View ArticleFamily Is the Deepest Scar: Minae Mizumura’s Inheritance from Mother
As I’m reading read the passage in Minae Mizumura’s Inheritance from Mother about the displeasure of having to share a hospital room divided by a mere curtain, I sit next to my deteriorating...
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VISIBLE: Women Writers of Color: Tamiko Nimura
During World War II, my Japanese American father and his family were incarcerated behind barbed wire on the West Coast. Some thirty years later, just as I was about to be born, my dad finished writing...
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Rumpus Exclusive: An Excerpt from A Student of History
What can I say about that night at the museum, the first of many events I attended with Mrs. W—? It was both daunting and thrilling, all the more surreal because it happened in a place I knew. I’d been...
View ArticleBeginning Again: Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous
To say On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, acclaimed poet Ocean Vuong’s debut novel, is only a novel would diminish its essence and ambition. For it is also an epistle—the book takes the form of a letter...
View ArticleAngry Reminders: Lee Ann Roripaugh’s Tsunami vs. the Fukushima 50
Human beings like to make myths out of things we don’t understand. Modern mythologies—like comic book and science fiction characters—contain some of the metaphors for our greatest fears, our greatest...
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Wanted/Needed/Loved: Sanae Yamada’s Favorite Foods
I spend a lot of time on tour, traveling all over the place for music, for many months out of the year, many years on end. I get homesick sometimes but it’s not really for a place—more like for a...
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A Space for Magnanimity: Talking with E. J. Koh
Eun Ji Koh was fifteen when her parents moved back to South Korea, leaving Koh and her brother alone in California. Years later, Koh discovered a box full of letters her mother had written over those...
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Cultural Attunement and “Otherness”: A Conversation with Aimee Liu
Best-selling author Aimee Liu‘s exquisite new novel, Glorious Boy, took her years to complete and proves itself well worth the time. Set before and during World War II on India’s remote Andaman...
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