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No One Cares About Your Dreams—Unless You’re a Famous Writer
It’s true: no one likes to listen to other people describe their dreams. It’s unfair, of course, because pretty much everyone loves to describe their dreams—even if they’re too polite to do so most of...
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Lynn Melnick: “I Believe Words Possess a Magic Power to Make Change”
Lynn Melnick’s second book Landscape with Sex and Violence borrows from the gothic pastoral to remind us that a landscape can be conducted in hard grays and the bodies embedded in it are more than its...
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Justice for Maggie: On George Eliot’s Most Underrated Heroine
In the first half of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871), perhaps one of the most illustrious novels of the modern era, the narrator opens a chapter by reporting the the goings-on of heroine...
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How David Bowie Made Life Less Suffocating for Young Queer People
2016 was a terrible year for the entertainment industry. For a while, it seemed that every time you opened a newspaper, or every time your smart phone signaled an update from Twitter or Facebook, the...
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Don’t Romanticize Science Fiction: An Interview with Samuel Delany
Encountering Samuel R. Delany’s work, for me at least, can be described in two phases (more like paroxysms): the first is being so overcome by the true presence of a genius or polymath writer, the...
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Jamie Quatro: How Should a Christian Writer Be?
A few pages into Fire Sermon, the debut novel by Jamie Quatro, I began to think of Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Flaubert said the novel was “the work of my entire life.” From his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Literature of Bad Sex
In a roiling climate of grievances and exhumed pain, at the end of a dull and lurid year, something astonishing happened. After the unmasking of Weinstein and amid the whole sorry cavalcade of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where the Grass is Greener: 5 Irish Tales of Straying Wives
There’s a long-standing joke in Ireland, which harkens back to a lament by a conservative politician in 1967, that before television, there was no such thing as sex in Ireland. This is not, of course,...
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Lidia Yuknavitch: The Time I Snuck Into Ken Kesey’s Fiction Class
My home life in my teens was claustrophobic, abusive, a horror. Simultaneously, I was not fitting into any group or clique at school. My only safety was aloneness. So it felt like there was nowhere to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
No One Cares About Your Dreams—Unless You’re a Famous Writer
It’s true: no one likes to listen to other people describe their dreams. It’s unfair, of course, because pretty much everyone loves to describe their dreams—even if they’re too polite to do so most of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Lynn Melnick: “I Believe Words Possess a Magic Power to Make Change”
Lynn Melnick’s second book Landscape with Sex and Violence borrows from the gothic pastoral to remind us that a landscape can be conducted in hard grays and the bodies embedded in it are more than its...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Justice for Maggie: On George Eliot’s Most Underrated Heroine
In the first half of George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch (1871), perhaps one of the most illustrious novels of the modern era, the narrator opens a chapter by reporting the the goings-on of heroine...
View ArticleClik here to view.
How David Bowie Made Life Less Suffocating for Young Queer People
2016 was a terrible year for the entertainment industry. For a while, it seemed that every time you opened a newspaper, or every time your smart phone signaled an update from Twitter or Facebook, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Don’t Romanticize Science Fiction: An Interview with Samuel Delany
Encountering Samuel R. Delany’s work, for me at least, can be described in two phases (more like paroxysms): the first is being so overcome by the true presence of a genius or polymath writer, the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Jamie Quatro: How Should a Christian Writer Be?
A few pages into Fire Sermon, the debut novel by Jamie Quatro, I began to think of Gustave Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Flaubert said the novel was “the work of my entire life.” From his...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Literature of Bad Sex
In a roiling climate of grievances and exhumed pain, at the end of a dull and lurid year, something astonishing happened. After the unmasking of Weinstein and amid the whole sorry cavalcade of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Where the Grass is Greener: 5 Irish Tales of Straying Wives
There’s a long-standing joke in Ireland, which harkens back to a lament by a conservative politician in 1967, that before television, there was no such thing as sex in Ireland. This is not, of course,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Men of a Certain Age: On Sex, Privacy, and Pornography
An older pornographer calls me after a decade of silence. It is midnight in Berlin, summertime. When I see his number on the display, I think there can only be one reason he’s calling. He’s dying. I...
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