Issues

Farrar, Straus & Giroux, September 2021, 276 PP To what extent is sexual desire innate? It’s a tricky question for science to answer, given the difficulties of disentangling a sexually mature person from their social influences. (As the British neuroscientist Gina Rippon points out, gendered socialization physically changes the brain.) Attempts to control for socialization—in the comparison of sexual preferences across cultures, in the analysis of genes—can be ethically fraught and are largely inconclusive. The

Omnibus Press, May 2023, 254 pp. “EVERYONE THINKS THEY know what a love affair is. But what is a love affair really?” Young Kim asks this right off the bat in her debut memoir, A Year on Earth with Mr. Hell, the subject of which is her own personal experience of two love affairs with punk elders: Malcolm McLaren and Richard Hell. Purchase “A Year on Earth with Mr. Hell” After a Long Island childhood,

Liveright, November 2021, 1024 pp. Patricia Highsmith’s novels—often psychological thrillers with queer themes—were a master class in the twisted human emotions that lurk beneath the surface of social respectability. A talented painter and illustrator, she often alerted readers to the hidden malevolence of her characters with a simple, visual detail. Architect Guy Haines spots a debonair stranger on the train with “a huge pimple in the exact center of his forehead” on the first page

VERSO, APRIL 2023, 288 PP. THIS NEWLY TRANSLATED collection of Izumi Suzuki’s short stories first published more than forty years ago is jaunty, odd, violent, femme-centric, funny—but what strikes me most is its freshness. A few charming period details (the presence of a Walkman, cassette tapes, a rotary phone, the novelty of color TV) dotted here and there allow the reader to set the action in the ’80s, but the stories, a mixtape of moods

OTHER PRESS, MAY 2022, 208 PP. We have always existed everywhere. In the Anglophone world of today, we are called trans women. We have had many names. Different cultures of “gender,” if that’s even the right word, leave different slots open for us. The gender system forced on much of the world by Western colonialism is unusual in how little regard it has for boys who turn out not to be men. Bad Girls is

MACMILLAN, MAY 2023, 208 PP. SUSAN ROSENBLATT WAS born in 1933 into a household that she would later describe as an utter cultural wasteland. Her family moved frequently, from New York to Arizona to California. Her father, a fur trader who worked in China, died of tuberculosis when she was five. Her stepfather, Nathan Sontag, a fatuous army captain whose last name Susan was nevertheless happy to take—“I didn’t enjoy being called a dirty kike”—told

  KNOPF, MAY 2022, 288 PP. Nightcrawling opens with an apartment pool full of dog feces, the cackles of a woman driven mad by life, and a seventeen-year-old protagonist who’s trying to figure out how to pay the rent. Kiara and her barely older brother, Marcus, live in a crumbling East Oakland apartment complex, left alone by parents who have succumbed to death, prison, or grief. Marcus wants to be a rap star and spends