I decided to take a break from having sad links and only have happy links. So you can look forward to some gay Sulu, bonkers Oscar Wilde adjacence, and Catullus telling people to go fuck themselves (he does that so well). Bahahaha Constance Holland (nee Lloyd; formerly Wilde) has a fake gravestone at a cemetery in Spain. OF COURSE SHE DOES God I love Oscar Wilde stories. American literature needs indie publishers, says The Atlantic. They don’t exactly go deep on the point that indie presses are an avenue for publishing more marginalized voices, so if y’all have a recent…
9 CommentsAuthor: Jenny Hamilton
Y’all, I love Mariko Tamaki. If I were in charge of the universe, I’d request that Mariko Tamaki subsequently do like romance authors and write one book for each of the notable minor characters in Saving Montgomery Sole.1 Saving Montgomery Sole is about a girl with two moms who struggles to fit in to her glossy, carb-hating California high school; and then a Jerry Falwell-type preacher comes to town, and Montgomery is certain that her family will be a target for his hostility. Mariko Tamaki hated high school and has said in interviews that she always struggled to fit in. In…
7 CommentsAre y’all ready for me to EXPLODE YOUR MIND GRAPES? Because the reason I read Bronwyn Dickey’s Pit Bull was this one interview that led me to some internet research that EXPLODED MY MIND GRAPES. Bronwyn Dickey said in this interview that we really don’t know anything about pit bull dog bites. And I was like, Um, okay, Bronwyn Dickey, I agree with you that pit bulls are misunderstood, but we know some stuff about pit bull dog bites, and because not knowing things drives me crazy, I went down an Internet rabbit hole researching dog bite statistics. Team. Team. Listen. We know…
32 CommentsYou May Also Like attempts to fathom the question of why people like what they like. Before reading this book, you’d probably answer “It’s complicated.” But after you read it? You’ll, um, you’ll still say it’s complicated. Human brains are complicated organs, and we are just not very good at understanding them. When I’m reading pop sciencey sorts of books, I am on a hair trigger with regard to bullshit neuroscience of the type that Cordelia Fine has conditioned me to be on a hair trigger w/r/t; i.e., that thing where it’s like “the same part of your brain lights…
13 CommentsAlton Sterling was killed in Louisiana on Tuesday, July 5th. Roxane Gay talks about his life and his death. Rembert Browne on people who don’t want anyone not like them to exist at all. Ijeoma Olua on the tragedy in Dallas and how we should (and shouldn’t) respond to it. Ta-Nehisi Coates on the unbreakable link between violence by police officers and violence against them. In the wake of Black Lives Matter pulling out of the Pride parade in San Francisco due to increased police presence, some thoughts on the disconnect between the two major civil rights fights of our…
8 CommentsI was going to start this post about The Other Slavery by making a really grim joke about Ir*sh sl*very (asterisked out so Nazi bros don’t find my blog), but then I just got hugely sad about living in a world where that’s still a lie people perpetuate instead of talking about real actual slavery. So instead I’ll start by saying that Andrés Reséndez has produced what feels to me like a monumental work of American history, delving deep into archival records to uncover the hidden story of American enslavement of indigenous people. Reséndez argues that while disease certainly played…
30 CommentsHappy Monday! It’s time for another installment of Angry Feminism by Gin Jenny, this time aimed at Brian Michael Bendis and Michael Gaydos’s Alias, the comic on which the Netflix Jessica Jones show is (loosely) based. Ready? Let’s get into it! This review will be broken up into two parts, one where I come not to bury Alias but to praise it, and then one where I have an enormous BUT and some further thoughts on Feminism. The bulk of Alias is a procedural story about Jessica Jones, Private Eye. I like this about Alias. If I had a complaint…
13 CommentsOkay, before I include a picture of the cover of Gabi a Girl in Pieces, I want you to know that I know that this cover is terrible. It’s a terrible cover that will nevertheless make you cry when you encounter the reason for it in the course of the book itself. By contrast, Gabi a Girl in Pieces is so totally non-terrible that you must instantly dash out and read it, particularly if you liked Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging1 but wished that it had more there there. Gabi is a Mexican-American girl in her last year of high…
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