Arielle Bernstein's writing has appeared in the Atlantic, the Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and AV Club. She teaches writing at American University and is working on both a novel and memoir.
Jacob Wren discusses his newest novel, Polyamorous Love Song, the relationship between art and ethics, and whether Kanye West is a force for good in the art and music world.
Obvious Child is sweetness, swaddled in a dirty joke. It’s the delicate pastel world of Wes Anderson, where characters are imperfect but want to get better. Where every asshole, in the end, has a really big heart.
Vampires have always been the sexiest of demon creatures, precisely because the bonds that connect them trigger every fear we have of connecting with another person...
We view women’s sexual journeys different from men’s sexual journeys, particularly because we still have a hard time seeing women as sexual agents. In Nymphomaniac we see a woman who is in clear pursuit of sexual pleasure.
"We live in a moment where images fill our lives in more obvious ways than words. Every day we scroll through Tumblrs, memes and gifs, a parade of images as completely absorbing as it is mind numbing."
In America we are explicitly taught that a healthy kind of love is a removed love...Love is the area outside of suffering, not within it...For me the experience of love has always been more primal than this...love is fire. It’s not a sigh; it’s a wail, one part caress and one part claw.