How do we come to terms with the undeniable pleasures of this blatantly ideological genre? 

Hundreds of eyes are looking at her, seeing not the novelist but some other unknown person

In Hejinian’s syntax of personhood within and around community, the self fits in only precariously among others.

The project became much more interesting to me as a novel, as satire, and as something with a lot of psychoanalytic dimensions, around the melancholic incorporation of voices of people whose politics we deeply reject.

Hundreds of eyes are looking at her, seeing not the novelist but some other unknown person

In Hejinian’s syntax of personhood within and around community, the self fits in only precariously among others.

Within each coupledom, clothing represents a tug of war for power

Who wants to simply disappear, no longer an individual but only an undefined part of some larger, homogenous body?

The project became much more interesting to me as a novel, as satire, and as something with a lot of psychoanalytic dimensions, around the melancholic incorporation of voices of people whose politics we deeply reject.

I like that idea that forgetting can be generative. And I would add that forgetting is sometimes necessary to learning, to change.

The Lenin mummy has been lying in the mausoleum on Red Square for more than a hundred years now, after all.

If there is one place where one must not censor oneself, it is in art, isn’t it? If there is one place where there should be no social punishment, it is in art.

How do we come to terms with the undeniable pleasures of this blatantly ideological genre? 

There’s a temptation, when we talk about illness and disability in fiction, to treat the body as either a tragic backstory or an inspirational obstacle course. These novels do something else.

As our attention spans dwindle and our phones loom over our everyday experiences, we are increasingly demanding that novels capture our attention in the same way.

Who keeps us safe all those nights? We do, by the stories we tell and the stories we cut apart, with chainsaws and with hearts.

The following playlist is humbly submitted for your listening pleasure from Full Stop, your full service literary journal. In

This special issue of the FULL STOP QUARTERLY will aim to hold folklore as a prism through which to view connection, the self, and the future. . . . It will explore folklore in and as literature, as process, and as performance.

In times like ours, times of fracture, depravity and upheaval—times which are really not that different than any other time on earth, except for the speed and scale at which violence is exercised—what is the value of art?

Read the introduction to our latest issue of the Full Stop Quarterly, “Literary Dis(-)appearances in (Post)colonial Cities.”