Barbaric figs and ducks? There’s something exotic, even poetic, about the origins of the orgue de Barbarie. We might well expect to encounter amid those figs and ducks in the lush linguistic verdure of Marianne Moore’s famous “imaginary gardens with real…
Rather than create opportunities for similarly milquetoast morality and wobbly reasoning, Adam forces her readers to commit to the giants outright and upfront, and base our solidarity purely on the principle that no one should be in a cage.
Dunn was quite possibly the last writer anyone would have expected to resurface, after nearly two decades of silence, with the 1989 bestseller and finalist for the National Book Award.
Maybe you know the drill: metahistorical intrigue and antiauthoritarian politics; several deep benches’ worth of quirky characters toting loudly emblematic affectations and not-strictly-probable names; song-and-dance numbers with rhythmically typeset…
For at least a year, the mail room in Penguin’s New York headquarters utilized a bomb-sniffing dog—named, for some unknown reason, Yalta—to screen packages.…
It hardly matters for this purpose whether the new spy writers, late of their intelligence agencies, can produce basically competent thrillers; they all can.…
In the end, it was this coalition of suburban centrists, rather than the more openly villainous Anita Bryant types, who paved the way for the drug war’s worst racialized harms.…
In media and popular culture, Newark has long appeared as irredeemably unsexy, violent, destitute. “Queer Newark reclaims Newark,” Strub declares defiantly, “as a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance.” The book snuffs out the…
