Issues

Newly discharged from my stay in the literary ICU that is Garth Greenwell’s novel Small Rain, I still had tubes, monitors, and groggy returns to consciousness on my mind when I encountered the narrator of Valentijn Hoogenkamp’s Antiboy waking up in a hospital bed. Surfacing from the anesthetics, Antiboy, Anti for short, tells the story of Hoogenkamp’s own transition and coming out. Described by the publisher as a nonfiction essay, but reading like an autofictional

I grew up in a house four blocks away from the Red River in Fargo, North Dakota. Follow the current of the river north, and you’ll find the smaller burg of Grand Forks, where my parents were raised; keep going toward the Canadian border and you’ll reach the rural farms and Icelandic immigrant communities of my grandparents. My young life was planted there, but my adulthood has been lived in the huge cities of New

Dear Dickhead is the new novel by one of France’s most celebrated contemporary writers, the so-called punk Virginie Despentes, who came to literary fame as a twenty-three-year-old in 1993 with her first novel Baise-moi (usually translated as “fuck me”). Despentes is a Gen-X French version of Diablo Cody. Since creating Baise-moi, she’s made films and she’s published feminist theory (such as King Kong Theory [Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021]) taught on US campuses, along with

From the first paragraph, multidisciplinary artist and animator Clement Goldberg’s debut novel New Mistakes telegraphs to the reader that they can and should throw out everything they expect from conventional narrative fiction and instead just flow with this weird and wicked ride for the next two-hundred-something pages. Those familiar with Goldberg’s short stop-motion animated films already have their pumps primed for the unexpected, funny, anthropomorphic, psychedelic, and tender turns the book will take. This novel

In 1999 my mother introduced me to John Singer Sargent. I was fifteen, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston was exhibiting the largest retrospective of John Singer Sargent’s works since 1926. Many of Sargent’s most famous paintings were at the MFA retrospective. There was Madame X (1883–84), the scandalous portrait that almost ended his career; Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose (1885–86), a luminous, Edenic picture of two girls lighting lanterns in a garden; and Dr.

One of the formative literary undertakings of my life was reading Lynda Barry’s Cruddy at sixteen. My mother bought it from a Goodwill, delighted by the striking ugliness of the cover, and then promptly abandoned it, telling me one morning at breakfast, “Just the most terrible situation you can imagine—that’s what this book is about.” Ever the grit-hungry sleaze, I offered to take it off her hands. What I found when I pored through those