Sometimes a writer does not choose their subject--their subject chooses them. Such could be said about Lisa Cohen’s stunning biography All We Know, a triptych portrait of three women, all part of a lively sapphic social circle in the early 20th century.
Cohen took time to talk to with Lambda about the path of her research, the negotiation between fact and fantasy, and the great Sybille Bedford, who provided both invaluable stories and friendship. Read More
Lisa Cohen’s lush biography, All We Know (Farrar Straus and Giroux), is a staggering labor of love that offers a triptych of three women of a queer persuasion. Cohen sets this story in the early 20th century, giving her audience a catalogue of the largely forgotten life during that time. Her subjects--the great intellectual Esther Murphy, the celebrity connoisseur Mercedes de Acosta, and the fashion maverick Madge Garland... Read More
A popular creative writing prompt is to imagine two people who would never speak to each other, trapped in an elevator together. What would they talk about? Would they be able to get along? Divorced transportation engineer Ismail Boxwala and the queer twenty-something Fatima Khan are two such people whose paths would never cross, but their unlikely friendship becomes the linchpin of Farzana Doctor’s second novel, Six Metres of Pavement (Dundurn Press), where love and family become redefined when the characters choose to help each other. Read More
Schulman is brilliant at conveying how devastating and surreal it was to live during the AIDS crisis, and in examining its impact on the living, she draws connections between the gentrification of cities like New York and the coincidental timing of the AIDS crisis... Read More
On the page, Love’s poems remind you that rhyme is the root word for rhythm. Contemporary poetry may have long shied away from the limits of rhyme, but Love’s wordplay is refreshing, executed with precision and a clear, performable quality. All of her poems have a direct relationship with their audience, relying on a rich sense of community instead of any writer-reader barrier. Read More
We’ve all had to deal with the nonsense of being seen singularly as one who acts on behalf of a...
For many, many years, Scandavian artist Tove Jansson’s internationally popular children’s books, the Moomin books, included the biography that Jansson...
