Reviews
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The Queer Valentine of the Century: Jenny Johnson’s In Full Velvet
In Full Velvet offers the truth of a woman’s life—the queer truth, the queer rose, the queer valentine. And everything is different after that moment of initiation, instantiation.
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The Otherworldly Intrigue of Daisy Johnson’s Fen
As a reader, the world of Fen won’t leave you. That is Johnson’s power as a writer—she creates a dark, self-aware world that feels heavy and gray and covered in mist.
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We Have Met the Maelstrom, and It Is Us: Dean Rader’s Self-Portrait as a Wikipedia Entry
Umbrellas are flimsy shelters from the maelstrom, and Rader keeps going because he can’t stop.
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Inequality Is Everyone’s Problem: The Broken Ladder by Keith Payne
Inequality, in Payne’s eyes, is massively detrimental to everyone in unequal societies, and everyone needs to know it.
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The Whimsy and Discipline of Anne Garréta’s Not One Day
If people cannot be captured, if “there are only erasures,” then might as well seek them in elisions, where their potential remains.
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A Full-Throated Cry from a Clarion: Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan
We seem to be floating in a weird soup of truthiness and alternative facts. Perhaps the state of American life explains the explosive power of The Book of Joan, or perhaps it’s the other way around; perhaps, at last, American…
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Marie Howe Is Magic: Reading Magdalene
Howe’s Magdalene is ambitious in its reach and strangely timely, as American society has swung to the right and, in the process, against the tide of equality for women.
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Jessa Crispin Can’t Do It Alone in Why I Am Not a Feminist: A Feminist Manifesto
Crispin’s writing strikes a tone that at times parallels neoconservative—even alt-right—pundits: commentary peppered with political injunctions, not criticism.
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A Portrait of the Writing Process: Durga Chew-Bose’s Too Much and Not the Mood
Chew-Bose approaches the word essay less as a noun and more as a verb.
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Only Patricia Lockwood Could Get Away with Priestdaddy
As we know from her poetry, Lockwood’s humor can shape-shift into something else entirely, something quite moving.
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The Teenage Girl in All of Us: Last Sext by Melissa Broder
Last Sext captures a youthful, hard, myth-informed, sleep deprived, aroused, spiritually searching, self-loathing worldview embraced by many of the young women in our lives.
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Fantasy Is a Writer’s Most Powerful Weapon: Literature Class, Berkeley 1980
The reality of the horror cannot be put into words, cannot be realistically described; it can only enter through imagination.