Issue 1.3

GRAYWOLF PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 320 PP. A POET AND a psychoanalyst walk into a bar. That sounds like the setup to a joke, but really, it’s a scene from Nuar Alsadir’s enthralling new book, Animal Joy: A Book of Laughter and Resuscitation, and, in this case, the poet and the psychoanalyst are one and the same: Alsadir herself. In this expansive and erudite meditation on the relationship between laughter and basically everything else, Alsadir interweaves

UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA PRESS, AUGUST 2022, 320 PP. EVERYBODY EATS, SO what’s political about eating? After reading Eating While Black, the answer is clear: everything. As a sociologist who studies Black beauty and hair, another topic that at first glance is often misjudged as banal, I was immediately drawn to anthropologist Psyche Williams-Forson’s analysis of Black food as creative material that simultaneously symbolizes social hierarchies and individual taste. Our bodies—what we put on them,

MCD X FSG ORIGINALS, JUNE 2022, 320 PP. “IF YOU CAN stand it, I’m going to describe a six-second video.” Kaitlyn Tiffany opens her engaging and persuasive book on online fandom with an apology and a question. She’s about to immerse you in the pleasures of Internet culture, and what she’s asking is: Can you come with her? Will you let her remember the in-jokes of the years she spent as a fan, and do

GROVE ATLANTIC, JULY 2022, 356 PP. HORROR IS A genre full of feminist potential. In a talk at the 2020 Horror of the Humanities, an annual Halloween event hosted by DePaul University, philosophy professor and Humanities Center Director H. Peter Steeves made the point that horror is an excellent vehicle for feminist messages and interpretations, its plots often hinging on a disbelieved woman. The female protagonist is the only one who perceives how screwed up

KNOPF, JUNE 2022, 240 PP. WHAT SORT OF novel is Marcy Dermansky’s Hurricane Girl? This is not an easily answered question, and I suspect it may depend somewhat on the mood of the reader. A book with girl in the title signals a page-turner, and Hurricane Girl does compel us with sex, violence, the open question of whether the heroine will be all right. As in psychological thrillers, it is not always clear whether the

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, APRIL 2022, 688 PP.Bronislava Nijinska and Valslav Nijinsky in L’Après-midi d’un faune, 1912. BRONISLAVA NIJINSKA (1891-1972) first made her mark as the kid sister and muse of the famous dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky. Nijinsky, the “God of Dance,” was a troubled genius⎯his original works include some of the first modern ballets–L’Après-midi d’un Faune, The Rite of Spring–whose legendary career was cut short at the age of thirty, when he was institutionalized

MCD X FSG ORIGINALS, JUNE 2022, 288 PP. TO REREAD IMOGEN Binnie’s cult classic Nevada nearly ten years after its first publication is to remember the seismic shift this novel created in both queer/trans literature and in life. Nevada, initially published in 2013, was the crest of the wave that was Topside Press, a small-but-mighty, short-lived press run out of a New York living room by trans friends that became, for a few years, the

SOFT SKULL PRESS, JULY 2022, 320 PP. FIFTY PAGES INTO Elvia Wilk’s new essay collection, Death by Landscape, I did something kind of weird: I contacted Elvia Wilk on Instagram. I told her I was reading the book and intended to review it, and I tried to express how it seemed to be explaining my own inner life to me, articulating connections between my current, inexplicably disparate preoccupations. These preoccupations include stories of women turning