*Note: I conceived of this article and wrote much of it prior to October 7th, 2023. It’s reasonable to contend that cultural repression is not the most urgent matter in…
Archive for July, 2024
The Family Plot: Suspicion, Conspiracy, and the “Shadow Pandemic”
In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 lockdowns began for the foreseeable future, it felt quite obvious that, among a myriad of emergent crises, domestic abuse was suddenly surging. It was…
Real Women
Supposing that Truth is a woman — what then? —Friedrich Nietzsche, preface to Beyond Good and Evil “Are you really being truthful, Grandmamma? Really and truly truthful?” —Roald Dahl, The…
Looking at the “Infra” of Infrastructure
Suspicion circulates freely throughout Lydia Millet’s fiction. In the middle of her 2011 environmental-quasi-detective-novel Ghost Lights, the narrator explains that Hal, the protagonist, was “finding it hard to relinquish his…
Suspicion, As Seen on TV
On August 23, 2000, in the finale of the first season of Survivor, as over 51 million people1 watched, Wisconsin truck driver Sue Hawk cemented herself in reality television history…
Introduction
The other day I watched the neo-noir movie Angel Heart (dir. Alan Parker, 1987) starring Robert De Niro as a character named Louis Cyphre and Mickey Rourke as a hard-living…
“A list that reflects the world”: An Interview with Peter Blackstock
Peter Blackstock has made a reputation for being the only one to say yes. He acquired Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer after 13 other publishers rejected it. The novel went on to win…
“Escríbelo como si me lo estuvieras contando”: How a Mojado Writes a Cross-Border, Cross-Linguistic Narrative
The words in my title — Escríbelo como si me lo estuvieras contando (“write it as if you were telling it to me”) — were spoken by Dick Reavis, a white…
“Amazing Connection and Blazing”: The 1970s and 1980s Lesbian-Feminist Editorial Practices of Out & Out Books, Diana Press, and Aunt Lute Press
“The women’s presses keep the book in print until it finds its audience; Daughters, Inc. has gone back to press (sold out the first 3,000 copies) on every one of…
Feminist Poetry & Editorial Labor at Amazon Quarterly, Chrysalis, and Sinister Wisdom
Editorial labor was a crucial — but often overlooked — aspect of creating not only the body of work we now recognize as feminist poetry (and its varied lineages) but…