Since I first discovered John Irving while I was in college, with his breakout novel, The World According to Garp,...
With yet another global warming summer upon us, it’s time to head to the beach, the mountains or maybe just...
He didn’t obfuscate with his sci-fi and fantasy stories–he was always detailing the complexities of the interior life of his characters within the context of a vivid cultural and physical landscape, regardless of where those characters were situated. And in his lush, lyrical descriptions the marginal became central. Read More
Sendak’s drawings were engaging and his prose accessible, yet both conveyed more complexity than was seen at first glance. That complexity–and the fact that his stories were not always tales with happy endings–was what made Sendak’s work so compelling. He depicted the world in which children live as well as the one they visit--reality and imagination--as visceral, wild and sometimes dark places. Read More
Like everyone who has won–or lost–an award, I have mixed feelings about them. It’s good to be a nominee/finalist, great to be a winner, not so wonderful to lose, unsettling to be judged. Yet I like the principle of giving people recognition for the hard work that propels talent to the next place. Read More
"...I was caught not just in the web of her words, but in the weft of her ability to express her politics so keenly, so succinctly, with such force and breadth."
Writer Victoria A. Brownworth remembers poet, lesbian, feminist, activist, and essayist Adrienne Rich Read More
Back before I was ill myself, back when I was a writer who traveled to the story, rather than needing stories to come to me, I spent a decade covering writers who were dying.
It wasn’t a plan–I was a young reporter and I got assigned a beat that no one thought would be big in the 80s: AIDS. Read More
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to be less of a procrastinator and to read more–and more broadly. Mystery is still my favourite genre, however, so in keeping with at least one of those resolves, here are some of my picks for lesbian mysteries you should have read in 2011. Read More
Trick of the Dark (Bywater Books) is something old and something new from McDermid. A stand-alone novel (not one of her series detectives appears) and thoroughly, engagingly, compellingly lesbian as well as being just as bloodily intense as her previous thrillers. Read More
Barbara Grier, publisher, activist, archivist and lesbian-feminist hellraiser, died November 10th in Tallahassee, Florida, where she had lived for years with her partner of four decades, Donna McBride. She was 78.
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