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& yes, my family did raise me right. Yes, / they cleaned their bones & cracked them clean / open to suck. Would fight over cartilage & knuckle/Sip the marrow’s nectar from urn. .
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If Holly invites five women over, what is the ratio of “fear” to “coven formation”?
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“[A]s long as we retain all of these conflicting ideas of what sex is, and what it means to us, sex will always sell—until it’s inconvenient.”
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I’m not here to wallow in what feels like our new dystopia, no. Me? I am here, to rest up before the next bout. I am here to watch The Price Is Right and make friends.
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Brooke C. Obie discusses the historical basis for her debut novel, Book of Addis, writing to dismantle white supremacy, and why Black speculative fiction is integral to her survival.
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In Westeros, revenge mostly operates within the feminine realm…
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When you live in a political football it’s hard to ignore getting kicked.
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To this day no one really knows where my kris came from or whether or not it’s a significant part of my family history, if it’s a random object or an heirloom with an untold story.
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Sexual politics run through the very veins of this show. They are its blood, and they know how to get the female viewer’s heart pumping.
...moreHi there! We’re the two brunettes who hate sex. Sara-Kate hates sex because it’s too aerobic—she once sprained her foot. She lives in Kips Bay, loves candy, and wears exclusively rompers. Elisa Jordana hates sex because she abhors the human penis and all its functions. Not a fan of balls, either. She lives on the […]
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Emily Barton discusses dieselpunk, genderqueer magic, and the collaboration between reader and writer in her latest novel, The Book of Esther.
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Jessa Crispin on reading abroad, watching ships chug through the Bosporus, and watching Outlander.
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Jonathan Van Ness discusses his podcast, Getting Curious with Jonathan Van Ness, fierceness, curiosity, and hairstyles.
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The days of testosterone-fueled warmongering are long past. Instead, at the end of Season 6, the queens reign, stronger than ever.
...moreFor many stories, death is an inciting incident that forces plot to move forward (looking at you, Game of Thrones). We’re so accustomed to stories where people die, it would seem that animals dying in fiction is barely noticeable, right? At Lit Hub, Laura Lampton Scott disagrees: according to her, we should be more careful about when […]
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The Rumpus Book Club chats with Martin Seay about his debut novel The Mirror Thief, the Great Work of alchemy, researching optical prosthetics, and keeping plot lines straight in a 600-page novel.
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If nothing else, it’s the opinion of other women that encroaches on mine. Resemblances spark my joy; differences become character flaws.
...moreSpoilerphobes worldwide had their greatest fears realized last Saturday when George R.R. Martin announced via blog post that The Winds of Winter, the next installment in his A Song of Ice and Fire series, was not finished in time for publication early this month. The delay gives the the TV series a head start to finally surpass […]
...moreAs adapting book series for lucrative movie deals becomes an all-too-common sight these days, it might be easy to simply fall back on the bookworm’s argument that the books are better than their film counterparts. But how do the reviews from the readers, viewers, and critics actually compare? Electric Literature has a handy infographic compiling […]
...more“Conlang” is short for “constructed language,” which is just what it sounds like: a language that has been constructed… conlanging is an art as well as a science, something you might do for your own pleasure, as well as for the entertainment of others. From J. R. R. Tolkien to Esperanto and Game of Thrones, […]
...moreFor all their imaginative potential, fantasy series often fail to think outside the whitewashed walls of the same old box: We can consider worlds in which protagonists must contend not only with dark prophecies and darker enemies, but also with gentrification and unreliable subway lines.
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Lidia Yuknavitch discusses her latest book, The Small Backs of Children, war, art, the chaos of experience, and that photograph of the vulture stalking the dying child in the Sudan that won the Pulitzer Prize.
...moreSerial novels are nothing new, especially in genre fiction designed to keep readers shelling out money for the next phase of a story. But the sudden, rapid success of fantasy genre series like George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and the adaptation of Tolkien’s hobbit epics to the big screen has meant publishers want to cash […]
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Why then are we comfortable with women routinely being cast as the victims of violence? Why don’t we see that as sexist? Where is the outrage?
...moreEver wondered how the Icelandic goats in Games of Thrones almost went extinct? Justin Taylor did, and he explores the answer at Pacific Standard.
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It’s hard to remember why I was silent. Maybe, like some of the women only now reporting they were raped by Bill Cosby decades ago, I was afraid I wouldn’t be believed.
...moreThe success of The Magicians trilogy stems in part from its self-awareness. Lev Grossman wields his familiarity with fantasy genre fiction to critique and alter the usual formula. So why do his female characters all serve the same purpose? …he’d almost certainly be familiar with the infamous tradition of “Women in Refrigerators,” coined by comic […]
...moreThe average Netflix subscriber streams 87 minutes of video a day—four episodes of a half-hour comedy. We don’t just binge because it’s something to do and we’ve got time to kill. There is something deeper going on.
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