For The Book Obsessed
[ad_1] Myths about romantic and familial love run rampant in our heteronormative, patriarchal culture. As children, we’re trained to believe that romantic love is the most noble love of all, that breakups are failures, and that being a mother is the purest way to love a child. Queer and trans communities have been pushing back … Read more
[ad_1] Science fiction has a longstanding interest — a sub-genre, even — in using technology and far-future settings to think about gender. Classic feminist SF from the 1970s on, like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, imagined worlds with gender roles reversed, complicated, or erased; almost all far-future, post-scarcity works, like Iain … Read more
[ad_1] When I first met Keiler Roberts, I wasn’t aware of her work. Harboring feelings of untapped potential due to my art-major mother, it was a simple desire to learn how to draw that brought me into Professor Roberts’ classroom. But soon thereafter, I remedied that ignorance, and learned that the wry wit and earnestness … Read more
[ad_1] “Sitting down to write a letter, with an addressee and signatory, is an intimate experience,” editors Christopher K. Ho and Daisy Nam write in the introduction of Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts. The pretext is deceptively simple: Ho, a visual artist, and Nam, a curator, invited Asian Americans, loosely defined, working … Read more
[ad_1] At ten years old, Brian Broome tried to take lessons from his friend Corey on how to be “cooler”: “…Black boys had to show through our behavior that we were undeniably, incontrovertibly the most male. The toughest. We sat on either end of his bed and I got lost in his pretty brown eyes … Read more
[ad_1] Last March, tweets urging writers to refrain from writing about the pandemic were so common they became as tiresome as the phenomenon they hoped to head off. No one wants to read your quarantine fiction, they insisted. No one living through hard times wanted to read a book about those same hard times, and … Read more
[ad_1] The world is dying and it is all humanity’s fault—an on the nose observation, but one that encapsulates Octavia Cade’s novella, The Impossible Resurrection of Grief. We meet marine biologist Ruby in a near-future Australia, immersed in her study of jellyfish while dealing with the fallout of a colleague and friend drowning in the … Read more
[ad_1] Susan Orlean is known for making her readers care about people and things they may not have otherwise noticed. On the short list: German Shepherds, libraries, luxury condos, a 10-year old boy named Colin Duffy, and, of course, orchids. Coming up on the 20th anniversary of the film “Adaptation,” itself an adaptation of her … Read more
[ad_1] Yelena Moskovich’s third novel A Door Behind a Door is a phantasmagoria about immigration, death, and queer desire with a plot that defies easy description. It centers on a young immigrant in Milwaukee named Olga. When Olga was a baby back in the Soviet Union, a boy in her apartment building stabbed an old … Read more
[ad_1] May 17 holds a particular significance for the LGBTQ+ community, as it commemorates the World Health Organization’s decision to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder. It’s the day that rejects discrimination against lesbians, gays, bisexuals, bi-curious, queer, transgender, intersex, and all those who have diversified sexual orientation. It empowers the LGBTQ+ community and motivates … Read more