Sandy Lake is as known for its crime as it is for its lake and small-town charm, and Joshua Moehling's sophomore novel, Where the Dead Sleep, beautifully marries quaint and thrilling. Everyone knows everyone, and, more importantly, everyone's got a secret. Read More
Described as an “incantatory long poem, [that] draws the reader into a dreamworld where the barrier between life and death grows porous, populated by ancestors and spirits,” Dream of Xibalba by Stephanie Adams-Santos is hard to give a synopsis of. The difficulty risked in the book avoids easy summary. A note in the table of contents provides a clue into this difficulty: “[This is a]poem in twelve parts, as in the hours of a clock. The fragments are untitled; the following are first lines.” The word fragment implies an incomplete nature and a lack of resolution. Read More
Cassandra Whitaker takes us into the weird and wonderful queer world of Michael Chang's newest poetry collection in this review! Read More
Vinnie Heaven takes on everything from queer homelessness to magical queer deer in their third play Faun. Read More
We’ve got something exciting to share! Poet, scholar, and fiction writer Carol Guess has granted us access to one of...
In her new memoir Love and Money, Sex and Death, theorist and professor McKenzie Wark faces these questions. Told as a sequence of letters to everyone from her mom to ex-lovers to herself, she takes readers into her past and the experiences and people who made her what she is today. The book travels from her youth in Newcastle through time spent in China and as a professor in Sydney before ultimately settling in New York City. Read More
Many writers try, but few capture, as Brandon Taylor does, the aesthetic texture of life under late capitalism in America: its petty cruelties, chewy atmospheres, and taut social relations. More expansive in terms of scope and characterization than his debut, Real Life – in which we view life mainly through the lens of a single protagonist – The Late Americansmakes a tour into, through, and between the lives of a band of troubled souls living in an Iowa college town. Read More
At the time of his death from complications of AIDS in 1984, Michel Foucault was considered one of the 20th century’s most influential intellectuals and philosophers. His work forever changed our understanding of sanity, sexuality, morality, and crime. And yet his life concealed a personal secret that might explain how he first arrived at his profound realizations about society. This secret is finally exposed to light in Foucault in Warsaw – a new book by Remigiusz Ryziński, a writer, gender studies scholar, and professor of philosophy at the University of Warsaw. Nominated for Poland’s most prestigious literary award, Foucault in Warsaw tells its fascinating story through colorful and fast-paced documentary reportage. Read More
As a rural lesbian, I always make it through Pride month with a few difficult questions: Whom can I count on? Where can my wife and I go? Who’s calling themselves an ally, and who’s “reclaiming” the rainbow? At the heart of these and similar questions is how I am intimately — or violently — connected to the people and places around me. Read More
On January 1, 1979, a Black queer fourteen-year-old committed to writing in his new diary every single day of the coming year and just about did. The teen lived in Simi Valley, a suburb north and west of Los Angeles, where Reagan would build his presidential library, where the police who beat Rodney King in 1991—on video—would be acquitted of all charges the following year. Simi Valley wasn’t just majority white; it was a Klan stronghold and home to so many (white) LAPD officers the locals called it “Copland.” 1979 was the year of the Iran hostage crisis, rising gas prices, peak disco, and the Sony Walkman. Read More