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Vanessa Hua: On the Banned Chinese Novel My Father Loved in His Youth
The last time I sat down to dinner with my father, we ate Chinese take-out: fish simmered in rice wine, and mala beef, swimming in an oily, numbing and spicy sauce. He told me about his favorite book...
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Have We Ever Had Enough Time to Read?
Literary history can seem full of women frustrated with their lack of time for reading. Florence Nightingale rails in Cassandra (1852) against the way women are constantly interrupted and never...
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The Pleasures of John Ashbery’s “Difficult” Poetry
When I learned that John Ashbery had died, I was on my way, with my then-fiancée (now-wife), to a coffee shop to write. But when we got our drinks and settled at our table, instead of writing I opened...
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Toward a Trans Literature of the Everyday
In Peruvian journalist Gabriela Weiner’s Sexographies I read “for a transsexual, she doesn’t overdo things,” and I wince. Later on, I begin to get angry when I see Weiner approvingly describe the same...
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How The Left Hand of Darkness Changed Everything
At a convention a few months ago, I found myself in the bar, talking to a young woman who wanted to expand her reading list. She read a lot of fantasy, but had only dipped her toe into sci-fi. Where,...
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Haruki Murakami: A Brief History of Japanese Short Fiction, According to Me
The following is from the introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories. * From Seppuku to Meltdown I once heard the story that when jazz drummer Buddy Rich was being admitted to a...
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Surviving Modern Times: Meditation Through Status Updates
In the summer of 2016, I was suffering from what I sensed was a condition so prevalent it seemed redundant to give it a name, but because I need to write about it now, I’ll simply say this: I was...
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The Time a Bitter Rival Stole a Manuscript From William H. Gass
William H. Gass was teaching when someone stole his novel manuscript. It was the summer of 1958, and Gass was working on the final chapter, “glaring” at a book that he struggled to finish. For years,...
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Why Literature Loves Lists
Here is a list, if you can bear the rhythm of one damn thing after another, for which the technical term is parataxis: a mode of structuring or storytelling that will be familiar alike to readers of...
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On the Third Most Popular Poet of All Time
The first thing that you learn about Khalil Gibran from an Arab, particularly a Lebanese immigrant in love with the Old Country, is that his name is not Khalil Gibran. Nor is it, as my edition of The...
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How to Tour the Most Bookish Island in the World
I was sitting in a busy cafe at lunchtime, waiting for my croque monsieur to arrive. It’s just a ham-and-cheese sandwich, but the dish has always held a mystique for me in the way that only French food...
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How the Great Lorraine Hansberry Tried To Make Sense of it All
Lorraine Hansberry was the first Black woman to have her play produced on Broadway and the first Black winner of the prestigious Drama Critics’ Circle Award. That first play, A Raisin in the Sun, is...
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Kafka’s Last Wish, Brod’s First Betrayal
On his deathbed, emaciated and robbed of strength, almost unable to speak or swallow, his breaths short and percussive as he coughed his life away, Kafka communicated with Dora Diamant and his doctors...
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Please Stop Talking About the “Rise” of African Science Fiction
Whenever I see an article that starts with “The Rise of. . .” I think of dough. When it’s applied to African science fiction, I picture an endlessly rising (and falling) dough that will never become...
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Our Love of True Stories Has Destroyed Our Sense of Truth
I. How do you normalize a human? All you have to do is tell the story of the person, who is human. If it’s a real person, with a true story, then that story becomes human data. Normalcy is a quality of...
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Where, Exactly, is the Overlap Between Storytelling and Technology?
To call the relationship between storytelling and technology symbiotic would be to miss the mark by a number of degrees. The two line up like an ouroboros reconfigured as a perpetual motion machine:...
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The Gordon Lish Lineage of Jewish American Writing
No American editor of the last half century has been profiled and talked about more regularly and energetically than Gordon Lish. As the Paris Review put it, “Not since Maxwell Perkins has an editor...
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The Dry-Eyed Mourning of Gary Indiana
The copy of Gone Tomorrow I wanted was a hardcover listed on Amazon as a “1993 Gay Signed First Edition,” printed in England by Pantheon, but it cost 40 dollars plus shipping. The one I ordered was an...
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The Avid Reader: Helen Simpson on Anton Chekhov’s “Oysters”
Not long ago there was an exhibition of Russian portraits in London, and on the way out I bought Chekhov’s stern bespectacled image in a cardboard mount. This is now propped in my work room by the door...
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The Queerness of Ernest Hemingway
I love Ernest Hemingway very much, which is unfashionable of me. Hemingway does not pass in my queer, feminist circles. Even in undergrad, we treated Hemingway fans with suspicion, because Hemingway is...
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