Cockfight – María Fernanda Ampuero
The majority of the stories in Cockfight end on an uneasy note that suggests the continuity of violence and the messy reality of living with its legacy.
By narrating natural destruction in a neutral tone, Fauna models one way that climate-fiction can serve environmentalism.
The Imago Stage – Karoline Georges
Georges suggests that reality can be lived, forming a lasting image instead of the preserved, yet temporary image of the virtual.
Marrow and Bone – Walter Kempowski
The overall mood of the novel combines these two elements, of trauma and consumption, the trauma kept at arm’s length while the consumption is real, material, and close.
My Morningless Mornings – Stefany Anne Golberg
Her essays seek lost worlds, not for the purpose of restoring them, but because for Golberg the mere act of searching is an ideal in itself.
The People’s Porn: A History of Handmade Pornography in America – Lisa Z. Sigel
THE PEOPLE’S PORN provides timelines and contexts showing that, no matter what obscenity laws our nation puts in place, individuals have always expressed their sexuality through art and crafts.
Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper – Diarmuid Hester
It was something like 2016 and I was sitting at the big La Colombe in Fishtown, in Philadelphia, reading Dennis Cooper’s THE SLUTS when I realized I was going to pass out.
Butler’s now habitual formal and stylistic maneuvers are beginning to seem more apparent.
CHRONOLOGY is a polyvocal text, a poetics of archive. The act of reading feels akin to debriefing with a friend. The impulse to help pull it together collectively.
Off Limits: New Writings on Fear and Sin – Nawal El Saadawi
In every one of the essays in Off Limits, El Saadawi calls for an ethic characterized by relating across difference that, far from reproducing discriminatory violence, might attend to difference as a catalyst of freedom.