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From Stephen Elliott
“Why do gay porn stars kill themselves” offers an intimate account into Conner Habib’s experiences in gay porn, and examines the cultural misunderstandings and attitudes regarding the recent suicide of gay porn star Arpad Miklos.
Habbib says:
...moreThe theories appeared as soon as the news did.
A dozen Decembers ago, my brother was found in his Bronco, burnt to shit. He had been out drinking with strangers—at least, that’s what the detective told us. The last words we know he said were, “Good night, new friends.”
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“You are the closest thing I have to a mother,” she said. My mother said this to me, her oldest daughter,
me, the only one of her four children unlikely to give her grandchildren. I am forty. I am single. I never wanted to be anyone’s mother.
Edouard Levé’s Suicide, a slim, declarative, idea-driven novel, is daring and raw, and packed full of rewards for any reader willing to take a wide step outside of the American mainstream.
This is the truth.
Around noon I gulped a shot of tequila and then placed a chair in my closet, sat down, shut the door and put my .22 rifle in my mouth. It didn’t fit well. The scope got in the way of positioning the barrel for a shot through my brain.
...moreReflecting, reminiscing, wondering, asking.
Jimmy Chen’s beautifully personal essay on HTML Giant, “Notes Toward a Suicide Letter”, explores suicide from multiple standpoints. Whether writing about a loved one or Kurt Cobain or Ernest Hemingway, Chen finds a way to express the infallibility of the darkest, yet most human, feelings and thoughts.
...moreMeet Chen Sah, “an odd and unlikely angel” who does his best to deter those attempting to throw themselves off the Yangtze River Bridge in Nanjing, China.
(via MeFi)
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“In every story of obsession there is only one character. I am writing about myself alone… for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life.”
Among the many places I was forbidden to go as a youth, was through the pages of a book that didn’t even exist in our bookshelves.
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In Please Come Back to Me, Jessica Treadway examines the ambiguities of the human heart, sometimes answering life’s dilemma’s too elegantly.
A Rumpus Meditation on Editors, Ambition, and Angry Dependence (in 33 loosely jointed parts):
1. On July 30, the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, Kevin Morrissey, took his life. His note stated that he “just couldn’t bear it anymore.”
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What do nuclear waste, suicide, and Las Vegas have in common? John D’Agata searches for meaning in the heart of Yucca Mountain
In this debut novel, an American woman running from personal tragedy falls headlong into the confusions and solaces of Japanese culture.
A first novel by playwright Jillian Weise tackles the moral and ethical questions surrounding both medical research and human relationships.“Sometimes it seems as though poets, in particular, move in an endangered artistic world. Think Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton. And, last month, Rachel Wetzsteon, an accomplished poet who took her own life at age 42.”
Jacket Copy last week pondered the unfortunate tendency towards suicide, especially among poets, and why you are not allowed to kill yourself anymore.
...moreIn 1996, Phillip Connors’ brother unexpectedly committed suicide. Now, over a decade later, Connors is getting closure through the completion of a 22,000 word account of his family’s experiences called “So Little to Remember”.
The piece, which tackles more than his family’s reactions to the suicide, began as a “thought experiment” put together by Connors to identify patterns in his brother’s life leading up to his unexpected death. “So Little to Remember” also reminds us of the important differences between life and writing about life, as the author explains in his note to Maud Newton. Ultimately, Connors feels his piece is independent from the events it is based on; a method of “letting go by making stories.”
“So Little to Remember” will be out in the latest issue of n+1 magazine. To tide you over, an excerpt is available on Maud Newton’s blog.
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