“Each year’s festivities had their own special character since gay people as a group change very quickly and things become dated, then nostalgic, then historic, in a matter of months. As Helen Hayes has put it, ‘Today’s kitsch is tomorrow’s collectible.’” Given the above, it’s hard not to encounter Sarah Schulman’s 'Girls, Visions and…
A beautiful little book about a brief summer when two teenage girls fell in love. It is no secret that it will end – everything ends – but they are different people forever because of those hot sticky afternoons where they intermingled their minds and bodies as much as they could, and learned the boundaries of where they couldn’t. It’s tender and earnest and simple and gay, and for as…
A Bride’s Story has gradually worked its way into becoming one of my favourite manga. It’s so adoringly detailed – such a true labour of animal- and history-nerd love – that its naive romanticism becomes its most endearing strength. Set in 19th-century Central Asia (modern-day Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, etc), it starts out as the story of a bright-eyed 20-year-old Steppe woman named Amir…
I LOVE THIS BOOK SO MUCH. I love its voice. I love its sadness and its flickering warmth and its tear-soaked tunnels of half-sight. I love it so vulnerably that I’m slightly worried that I’m giving too much away by telling you about how much I love it. The narrator of Harriet Armstrong’s To Rest Our Minds and Bodies is a young English woman studying sociology at uni. She falls in…
I saw THE ODYSSEY (2026) and I have SCATTERED 1AM THOUGHTS: Thought 1: We’re living in the wrong timeline. The reason I know this is because in the right timeline, 47-year-old Heath Ledger plays Odysseus, and it’s fucking electric. Matt Damon does a solid enough job with the role, but he plays Odysseus as this gruff haunted tree-log of a general. There’s no spark to his Odysseus;…
Jordy Rosenberg’s Night Night Fawn is a delight and a menace, filled with sentences so perfectly coiffed that I frequently had to pause to simply breathe in their perfume. The plot concerns an elderly New York yenta on her deathbed recounting the bitter ironies of her life, chief of which were her unsuccessful attempts to feminise her transmasculine son (who she only ever conceptualises as a…
The End of Reading Is Here (Archived version here ) I do my best to retain a hardy scepticism of inflamed narratives around the Death of Reading, but god – the idea of mass literacy turning out to just be a historical blip (sandwiched in between the age of orality and the age of non-stop digital entertainment) is genuinely terrifying to me. So much of what I value in the human is what reading and…
This is my first Elizabeth Strout, and it gave me pretty much exactly what I was expecting: a lovely, heartbroken little novel about the private shocks and ripples of a kindly old teacher’s heart. Strout shows us her characters’ hearts simply and gently, like hummingbird eggs — careful not to break them, because the world already does — and nudges us to marvel at how they keep beating.
A pretty extraordinary one. The kind of sci-fi that’s so awash with possibilities, it’s happy to dispense what could be another novel’s entire premise in a casual aside about a planet we never visit. Our protagonist is a horny bisexual king who has to be restrained at multiple points from poisoning people who’ve hurt his friends. There are nonbinary religious sects,…
Wow, okay. Huh. The setup of this novel is “a feral trans girl shut-in discovers a porn video of herself on the internet that she has no memory of making” – a nauseatingly compelling premise by itself – but good LORD it goes places from there. I don’t want to say too much, because feeling discombobulated and unsettled and wrongfooted by this story is very much What It Wants.…
An endearingly low-key and grounded account of alcohol addiction and sobriety. Julia Wertz is a queen, and there’s a really special place in my heart for comics like this. Shout-out to all the sober people in my life; I’m so proud of you 🙏💓
Absolutely in love with Lucia Berlin’s stories. When we were in Japan, I read one or two of them aloud to Laura each night before bed. Every world they plonk you in is so tangible and tasteable – often acrid and dusty, in the way of the American Southwest – that the heart leaps to protest when the story finishes. “No! What? Let me remain!!!” Then the next one starts, and…
Finished Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection and good lord — what an addictively painful disembowelling of contemporary loneliness, delusion, and shame. It’s a sequence of interconnected character-studies of people who are rejected by others (for reasons that are never totally clear to them, but which are cringingly obvious to us), and the spirals of shame and narcissistic abjection that…
There is a conversation in the fourth book of Solvej Balle’s ‘On the Calculation of Volume’, between people who are all stuck reliving the 18th of November over and over again, about the kind of language they need to describe their situation. Lots of them suggest words – for the initial disjunct in time, for the people who loop, for the people who seem like they don’t, etc…
Dennis Cooper’s The Sluts is a repulsively fascinating bit of epistemological puppetry. Published in 2004, it mostly takes the form of reviews on a gay male escort reviewing site, through which emerges a narrative of a messed-up and unnervingly receptive young hustler named Brad – a cute boy so game he’s supposedly going to let someone kill him. That narrative is swiftly contradicted,…
Sometimes I get so hungry for writing like this. When I say ‘600-page Romanian surrealist novel about a suicidally depressed schoolteacher who’s an alternative-universe version of the author’, you would probably make some assumptions about Solenoid – i.e. that it’s dense, verbose, solipsistic and exhausting – that are pretty much correct. It often reads as though the…
Rating the most trans passages in Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid I recently read the colossal surrealist novel Solenoid (first published in 2015, with the English translation by Sean Cotter debuting in 2022), and one of my most persistent reactions was … “is anybody else seeing how fucking trans this book is?” The esteemed Romanian novelist Mircea Cărtărescu is, as far as…
With the last month being consumed with the work of moving apartments, I haven’t had as much time to read — but when no-one’s got me, yuri manga’s got me. The Moon on a Rainy Night is a lovely, quiet series about the increasingly-romantic friendship between two high school girls, one of whom is hard of hearing. Her disability is presented with a lot of care and nuance, and you…
Most gorgeous evening imaginable: Lee Lai being interviewed by Rachel Ang for the Australian launch of the SUBLIME graphic novel ‘Cannon’. When I told Lee how much I loved the book, she looked at me skeptically and asked, “Do you think that you’re biased, though?” We’ve known each other since we were teenagers after all, so it’s a fair thing to wonder. But…