On Queerness, Empathy, and Afro-Modernity
Mark Gevisser: Hello Pwaangulongi Dauod. Your piece in Granta “Africa’s Future Has No Space For Stupid Black Men” is explosive, devastating, passionate. It feels very urgent. What drove you to write...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Riddle of the Vagina, and Other Victorian Attempts to Understand Women
The goal in Victorian fiction is marriage. Well, unless the goal is to solve a murder in a Rue Morgue or safely navigate the Mississippi on a raft. Otherwise, we look to the stories set in and written...
View ArticleEmily Witt on Love, Sex, and Orgasmic Meditation
Does the title of Emily Witt’s new book Future Sex refer to her own, or everybody’s? The answer is wonderfully complicated. Despite the intriguing sex-toy-centric cover art, Future Sex is less an...
View ArticleWriting the Body: Trauma, Illness, Sexuality, and Beyond
In September, Michele Filgate’s quarterly Red Ink Series—focused on women writers, past and present—brought together Eileen Myles, Ruth Ozeki, Porochista Khakpour, Anna March, and Alexandra Kleeman for...
View ArticleSex, Politics, and Coming of Age in the Clinton Years
To stand in a moment that feels like a transition to a new era—not only does the world bubble with anticipation, but our emotions feel amplified, intense, more closely observed. The time leading to the...
View ArticleThe Year in Single Women
Loving another is easy; loving yourself is hard: these are the words that occurred to me while reading five books on single women that were published in 2016. It’s funny, though, that this phrase...
View ArticleThe Evolution of Sex Writing
In setting out to write Future Sex, Emily Witt hoped to define what she once considered an “interim state”: the sexual identity of being a single woman unconstrained by long-term reciprocated love and...
View ArticleEverything I Know About Sex I Learned From Edna St. Vincent Millay
It was love at the very first line. I got off the bus in a strange neighborhood, a winter afternoon and already dark. It was after school and I was visiting my friend, Carolyn, to beg for help with...
View ArticleMy Job Writing Custom Erotic Love Letters
I left my marriage in 2001, refusing support from my ex-husband (other than a share of the sale proceeds of the house we had bought together). I couldn’t have known it when I left, but it turned out to...
View ArticleSharon Olds, America’s Brave Poet of the Body
Sharon Olds can still remember how furious editors became when she started submitting her poems, 40 years ago. “They came back often with very angry notes,” the 74-year-old poet says, sitting in her...
View ArticleThe Future: Where Sexual Ambivalence Meets Sexual Gentrification
“[I]t is always a question of how complicated we can allow people to be without feeling the need to punish them for it.” –Adam Phillips, “How Much Does Monogamy Tell Us?” The New York Times, October...
View ArticlePatty Yumi Cottrell: Writing is not Therapeutic in Any Way
“September 30th, the day I received the news of my adoptive brother’s death, I also received a brand-new couch from IKEA.” So begins Patty Yumi Cottrell’s brilliant debut novel, Sorry to Disrupt the...
View ArticleCrime and the City: Visiting Amsterdam’s Dark Side
Amsterdam—a good place to start Literary Hub’s investigation of the world’s Crime Cities. Everyone has an image of Amsterdam, an idea of what it’s like—canals, bicycles, harmonized urban living; a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Greatest Poetry Reading I’ve Ever Seen
An invitation to represent England at the 100th Anniversary of the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway was scary enough. But to share a stage with the Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko at the same time:...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jim Jones: Charismatic Micromanager, Gifted Preacher, Lunatic
When we talk about Jim Jones we don’t talk about the many years he spent traveling the US and preaching. We talk about the night when he and an unspecified number of his followers committed mass...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Lights
Dear You, The spring of the dead birds, the one after the death of my mother, I knew a broken angel was going to come into my life. And not a moment too soon! For a while after the funeral people...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Édouard Louis on Class, Violence, and Literature as a Space of Resistance
Édouard Louis’s debut, The End of Eddy, is a novel from life. Eddy Bellegueule was Louis’s legal name for the first two decades of his life. Growing up in a poor factory town in the north of France, he...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Eight Secrets About Sex From People I Know
It is my blessing and my curse to professionalize every single enthusiasm that floats through my distractible head. It’s this way for many journalists—you become fascinated by a subject, and then you...
View Article