November 2017

Boris Pasternak is best known for writing Doctor Zhivago, a novel which documents these years of national upheaval through the eyes of a poet...

‘We make art with our cunt,’ wrote ’90s cyberfeminists, VNS Matrix. ‘Gender abolitionism’ (Xenofeminism: A Politics for Alienation, 2015) has marked a shift in rhetoric, and Cornelia Sollfrank was the only 2017 delegate I remember to use the c-word

I sat on a wrought iron daybed facing an open window, and a warm breeze was pooling in. It was the first day in my second foster home...

Our first Christmas together, I was 39 weeks pregnant. He let me drag a seven-foot fir tree up the stairs to the flat and sat on the couch with a beer...

Our early literature owes something of its magnificence to the fact that writing was an uncommon art, practised, rather for fame than for money...

I do not know what my first language is. It’s definitely not English, of that at least I’m sure. Sometimes I think it’s the Southern Min language, spoken in the southern province of Fujian in China.

Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, William Burroughs, Richard Wagner, Sid Vicious, V. S. Naipaul, John Galliano, Norman Mailer, Ezra Pound, Caravaggio, Floyd Mayweather, though if we start listing athletes we’ll never stop.

Yeah, I mean, it made a kind of sense. Iron Chef: Showdown is leftovers of leftovers of leftovers, and I say that as a fan of Iron Nerd Alton Brown.

To work in academe is to live at an angle slightly askew to the regular run of American life.

No cars are permitted to drive the path that winds up the mountain. In fair weather, as now in late April, buses and horse-drawn carriages...

While touring England’s Lake District, poet Thomas Gray suffered what we might call a selfie-induced injury.

In Hardy’s “The Self-Unseeing,” he visits the remains of his childhood home and recalls where the door was, how the floor felt, how his mother sat...

by Joe Linker Rhombus and Oval, by Jessica Sequeira, What Books Press, 117 pp. “Rhombus and Oval” is the title of the lead piece in this collection of stories by Jessica Sequeira, a translator of Spanish and French, and a writer. The text of twenty-one stories runs 112 pages, each...

Before the confusion sets in, I’m going to try to make some statements, set out a few positions that will also be provocations and, inevitably, generalisations.

On a recent visit to my parents, my mother asked me whether I want to have kids. Being 30 and single, an uncle to a niece and a nephew...