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Saskia Vogel Talks Sex, Travel, and More
Saskia Vogel shares her very interesting stories on her travels, growing up in Los Angeles, her life in Berlin, how her mother inspired her sense of adventure… Vogel’s debut novel, Permission, has been...
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On Myra Breckinridge and the Life of Gore Vidal
“I am Myra Breckinridge, whom no man will ever possess.” With that imperious opening sentence, Gore Vidal introduced his flamboyant transsexual heroine, one of the most willful and amusingly self-aware...
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On the Love Hotels and Pleasure Quarters of Tokyo
Tokyo is a city of darkness, a city of light. Each melts into the other. At its center, the city of light blacks out, and at bridges and crossroads, at the margins around train stations, the city of...
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The Ways in Which Writing May or May Not Resemble Sex
Setting the Mood When I was younger, I wrote at my desk, a gracious Mexican affair bought in a first-sight passion. The seat was hardwood, ambitious. Many an essay has this desk to thank for its...
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André Aciman Finds His Way Back to His Famous Lovers
André Aciman is having a human moment. When I enter the uptown cafe where we’ve arranged to meet, I find Aciman, whose dapper navy button-up and neat silver beard make him look like the distinguished...
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This year’s Bad Sex Writing award split between two men and I refuse to make...
Taking their cue from this year’s Booker and Nobel judges, the 2019 Bad Sex writing award (judged, I am fairly sure, by a gangly quorum of 11-year-old boys who will not go to sleep) has been conferred...
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Hosting an Orgy? This 1970s Cookbook Has You Covered
Hosting a dinner party can be scary. It can feel like there’s pressure to be perfect, to set up some elaborate “tablescape” or make food so extravagant, complicated, or Instagrammable that it verges on...
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On the Strange Connection Between Brain Damage and Sex Drive
The accident had left me with a panoply of subtle and not-so-subtle changes to my personality. Beyond the extreme chair-destroying volatility I’d acquired, the new me found it hard to think, hard to...
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Talking Poetry and Porn with Garth Greenwell in a West Village Bar
To share a drink in a West Village bar with Garth Greenwell is to talk poetry and porn, saintliness and toxicity, narrative theory and anal sex, sometimes within the same sentence—“Epiphanic structures...
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Of Womb-Furie, Hysteria, and Other Misnomers of the Feminine Condition
Sometimes the strange actions of the body in question are taken for a name. The Dancing Plague, for instance, in which 400 people, in the streets of Strasbourg, in 1518, danced to the point of...
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The Unexpectedly Subversive World of Romance Novels
In the 1980s, feminist academics (including myself) became intrigued by romance reading, partly because—paradoxically—the rise of the women’s movement in the 1970s was matched by significant growth in...
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Tommye Blount: No One Gets Off the Hook in My Poems
For this installment in our series of interviews with contemporary poets, Peter Mishler corresponded with Tommye Blount. A Cave Canem alumnus, Tommye Blount is the author of Fantasia for the Man in...
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How Capitalism Created Sexual Dysfunction
In the beginning was sex. And sex begat skill, and skill (or its absence) begat judgement, and judgement begat insecurity, and insecurity begat doctors’ visits, which begat treatments, which have...
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22 Minutes of Unconditional Love
XXIII Finally, though, it must be admitted, I don’t know how to make you see Howard Rose as I saw him. How to capture for you the effect he had on my limbic system, sending it into disarray almost on...
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Leila Slimani on Sex and an Ethics of Women’s Liberation in Morocco
When, in the summer of 2014, I published my first novel, Adèle, some French journalists expressed surprise that a Moroccan woman could write such a book. What they meant by that was an “unconstrained...
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Why Americans Don’t Care About Their Presidents’ Sex Scandals
The coronavirus pandemic is dramatically disrupting not only our daily lives but society itself. This show features conversations with some of the world’s leading thinkers and writers about the deeper...
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Moved to Tears at the Magic Mike Live XXX Revue
I was led down a moodily lit hallway that descended steeply into darkness. It had the mystery and intrigue of walking into a Prohibition-era speakeasy, save for the thrumming Katy Perry song surfacing...
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The Best Sex I Ever Had Was (Also) a Narrative Structure
There’s something sexy about narrative structure. We’ve known this since before Robert Scholes wrote in 1979 that “The archetype of all fiction is the sexual act”—“the fundamental orgastic rhythm of...
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Monstrosity Plucked From Garbage Can: On Mae West’s early career as a...
Mae West is an icon: literally, a representative symbol. In the popular imagination, Mae West stands in for a certain type of seduction—blonde, campy, one-liner-heavy. But though West is best known for...
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A close reading of Margaret Atwood’s sexy cicada poem.
I was doing something perfectly domestic yesterday—possibly the dishes—when suddenly I heard Margaret Atwood’s voice on the radio reading a sexy poem about cicadas. Atwood is roughly of an age and...
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