Certainly not the Angel Red I might try, Fire and Ice was my mother’s one and only, flaming her lips and smooching my father’s. Faithful to her favorite shade, she lived her creed of right and wrong. She did not convert to a miniskirt or wear pants, except for hiking, and never applied pink by any name. The click when she capped the sleek cylinder was as distinct as the tap, tap of high heels
Dead at Last Dead at last! Dead at last! Now I can see the world as it is floating indifferent like the gull from the hospital window white with black wingtips feeling the currents of air guiding its flight. Perfectly free from compassion for me. Nirvana I can’t find the can opener and then I do. The electrician shows me my name on his forearm “Linda” in pink magic marker which is how he remembers
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MCD/FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, NOVEMBER 2022, 352 PP. FROM THE ARCHIVE of a literary icon, shouts the jacket copy. This novelist shudders. What do we fear more than to die and leave a manuscript unpublished? That fact represents years of effort, humiliation, discard, disappointment, setbacks, shirks, and ultimately, failure. And in this case, the late Katherine Dunn (1945–2016) was the author of one of our most popular of iconoclastic novels, Geek Love (1989), which created
GRAYWOLF, FEBRUARY 2023, 192 PP. STERLING KARAT GOLD, the new novel by the London-based writer Isabel Waidner, begins in what we might call consensus reality: “I’m Sterling. Lost my father to AIDS, my mother to alcoholism. Lost my country to conservatism, my language to PTSD.” Relatable. But the novel tumbles headlong into a surrealism that harkens to Kafka and seems the only logical strategy to interact with a global culture gone mad with fascism.
MARINER BOOKS, SEPTEMBER 2022, 256 PP. AMY FUSSELMAN WRITES like a comic—or a “stand-up philosopher,” as Mel Brooks’s character describes himself at the ancient Roman unemployment office window in History of the World, Part I. No matter how serious the topic, Fusselman reveals the humor. Her 2007 memoir, 8: All True: Unbelievable, for instance, delves into her experience with childhood rape in a way that leaves her reader unburdened and happy. Likewise, in The Pharmacist’s
NEW DIRECTIONS, OCTOBER 2022, 241 PP. I FIRST READ the poet H.D.’s autobiographical novel HERmione when I was twenty-four. This was 1981; the book had just been rediscovered in the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale and published by New Directions, more than a half century after its completion in 1927. Although I was of a different generation entirely, my life at the time resembled that of Hermione Gart, the novel’s heroine:
FARRAR, STRAUS & GIROUX, FEBRUARY 2023, 128 PP. ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET’S 1974 film Successive Slidings of Pleasure starts with the protagonist tying her nude female lover to the bed frame to paint flowers over her nipples. The next we see of this lover, she is dead, stabbed in the breast with scissors. While Successive Slidings of Pleasure is perhaps, as seventies art films go, not that grotesquely misogynistic, Robbe-Grillet inadvertently reveals his ignorance about lesbianism. The
Verso, 176 pp MISS MAJOR IS an icon of Black trans womanhood. Born in Chicago in 1946, she was on a path to some sort of Black middle-class life. At college in Minnesota, she left during her first term after a roommate discovered her femme wardrobe, came back to Hyde Park to live with her parents, and was arrested at twenty for speeding as she fled Chicago for New York. She did six months in
Still from Shola Lynch’s documentary Chisholm ’72: Unbought and Unbossed (2004). WHEN WE CELEBRATE a political “first,” we’re heralding the beginning—not the end—of a struggle. And yet, understanding the lives of trailblazers can instruct us in how to pursue justice in spite of institutional prejudice. Tomiko Brown-Nagin’s recent biography of Constance Baker Motley, Civil Rights Queen, provides one such example, beginning with Motley’s birth in 1921 to West Indian immigrants in New Haven, Connecticut. In
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