By John Knight
Stephen Florida is an obsession. His body is a vehicle for conquering, the people around him are either useful or obstacles, and his mind churns, devouring everything that stands outside a single thought: “My name is Stephen Florida and I’m going to win the Division IV NCAA Championship in the 133 weight class. That’s it.” Continue reading
By Glen Roven
I first met Willard Spiegelman in Los Angeles when he accompanied me on my many interminable drives from Santa Monica to my offices in Hollywood. He wasn’t there physically, but he certainly was a presence: his voice, narrating the Poetry Course from the Teaching Company — all 30-odd hours of it — was my constant companion for a month. Continue reading
Frances Stroh’s memoir Beer Money: A Memoir of Privilege and Loss details the hijinks of the indulgent and entitled cast of characters who are heirs to their family’s eponymous beer fortune. Stroh depicts her family with care, but like other memoirs and biographies of privilege — Sean Wilsey’s Oh the Glory of it All, Rich Cohen’s Sweet and Low, Jerry Oppenheimer’s Crazy Rich come to mind — the enjoyment of basking in voyeuristic splendor is overshadowed slightly by the incredulity of reading about rich people who are oblivious to other people’s problems. Beer Money portrays the stereotypical dysfunctional rich kid lifestyle: the characters are the children of narcissists and addicts; they are raised by loving or malevolent nannies; they watch their siblings be favored or scorned; they are sent to tony boarding schools (sometimes only to be expelled); they spend their quickly acquired cash on copious amounts of drugs and travel to luxurious locations (someone always seems to be traveling on the Concorde between New York and Paris); they suffer at the hands of cartoon-like evil step-parents; they see wealth slip from their reach, either plundered or withheld; they squander their prospects through idleness or ineptitude and redeem themselves by not being as idle and inept as they were raised to believe they were; they live through tragedies that will be seen by the 99% as not all that tragic. Beer Money made me laugh, cry, and cringe in equal measure. Continue reading
My husband and I met at work, and for two years we kept our relationship a secret in the office. When we tell people that, they imagine it as exciting and sexy: sneaking around for in-office trysts. But in truth, hiding our relationship was stressful and annoying. We lied to our colleagues, stood in awkward silence in the elevator, locked down our Facebook privacy settings, and entreated friends and family to never post a photo of us together. But when people listen to the story, our lives become most interesting as a Secret Office Romance, less so as just our lives. The reality isn’t always the best story. Continue reading
When Will Dillard was 15, his Preacher father caught him pleasuring himself with a candle in their Baptist Church. “He was not a violent man,” Will, the protagonist of How to Survive a Summer says, “but this — this — had been on the docket for a long time.” After beating Will until they’re both exhausted, Will’s father sends him to a backwoods gay conversion camp owned by their unqualified family in central Mississippi. Continue reading
By Zoë Hu
Seeing no alternative, a woman plants herself in her family’s courtyard and sprouts into a tree, begging aghast visitors, “Don’t cut me down. Let me grow.” Her name is Mahdokht, and her germination as human-cum-sapling has a loyal chronicle in the Iranian modernist novel Women Without Men, written by Shahrnush Parsipur in 1989 and first translated into English 10 years later. The text follows five women as they escape Tehran, shrug off dreary brothers and husbands, and — aided by the occasional, benevolent dollop of magical realism — find their way to a garden refuge. Rooted at the center of this botanical sorority, Mahdokht the tree-human is cared for and cultivated by the other women. She is also their witness, keeping time with her gradual growth to the loneliness and struggle that mark their isolated existences. Women Without Men asks its characters to begin new lives, free from the social mandate of a male partner, but once in the garden this possibility opens onto foreign, craggy territory. Unable to transform into a tree herself, one woman feels that nevertheless she is “rotting from within.” Continue reading
The crocodile of Taiwanese writer Qiu Miaojin’s recently translated first novel Notes of a Crocodile is and is not a metaphor, is and is not a character, is and is not really a crocodile at all. The crocodile — the subject of a half-dozen surreal and witty vignettes sprinkled throughout the novel’s overarching coming-of-age story — exists halfway, appearing here and there in fragments, snippets, prose that functions somewhere between fiction and theory. It’s that halfway feeling that’s so essential to and so refreshing about the book, the ambiguity of sex, gender, queerness, desire, and the question of identity itself, all the more sobering to read in today’s political climate. The crocodile’s favorite treat, the unnamed narrator slyly notes, is cream puffs. Pass the cream puffs, please. Continue reading
With Odd Birds, Ian Harding’s delightful short memoir on bird watching and being famous — a pair of subjects you probably know little about, dear reader, if you’re anything like me — I conducted an odd experiment: take the assignment to write about the book anyway, because why not? See what happens. Continue reading
The last time the United States was the world’s premiere manufacturing power, American citizens lived under the specter of an atomic assault. From their perch atop a nascent post-war order, the global superpower enjoyed unprecedented levels of production — it was the 1950s, and business was a-boomin’. Foreign relations, on the other hand, were rather precarious. Continue reading
When you read Tina Cane’s Once More with Feeling you will scratch your head and say, “What the fuck?” You might not actually say, “What the fuck?” But I did. The question gave rise to another one: “What took so long for someone to publish this book?” But don’t waste too much time on questions; return to the poems and read them again — once more, with feeling. One way to read this book is to listen to Lou Reed’s 1989 classic record New York. The book is a Romeo and Juliet of Hell’s Kitchen. That is to say, it is New York — a New York that rolls around in the late 1970s then falls straight away into the 1980s. If you were coming of age in New York at that time, be it in Queens, Manhattan, or Canarsie, you will get this book. It’s part of your DNA, already in you, even though you had no idea it was there. It’s some back page of your personality, which you might have filed away, might have forgotten about, but once you step inside Cane’s vision, boom, there you are, hopping into the L train at 14th Street and headed into Williamsburg. It’s 10th Avenue, stinking and brutal, up in your eyeballs. You know it. You will know it. Delicious, like a mile-high pastrami sandwich from The 2nd Avenue Deli, or the rear corner of Gus “N” Bernie’s Candy store, with all those fantastic comic books. Continue reading