KJ and I have been working on it for ages and pub week kind of snuck up on us.
This is ASEXUALITIES 2, basically - a revised and expanded second edition developed to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the first edition. We've included a number of essays from that first edition plus SIXTEEN brand new essays on topics such as ace ecologies, asexuality and geography, transmasculinity and aceness, ace and aro intimacies, ace activism, and more.
Here's the jacket copy: As one of the first book-length collections of critical essays on the topic of asexuality, Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives became a foundational text in the burgeoning field of asexuality studies. This revised and expanded ten-year anniversary edition both celebrates the book’s impact and features new scholarship at the vanguard of the field.
While this edition includes some of the most-cited original chapters, it also features critical updates as well as new, innovative work by both up-and-coming and established scholars and activists from around the world. It brings in more global perspectives on asexualities, engages intersectionally with international formations of race and racialization, critiques global capital’s effects on identity and kinship, examines how digital worlds shape lived realities, considers posthuman becomings, experiments with the form of the manifesto, and imagines love and relation in ecologies that exceed and even supersede the human.
This cutting-edge, multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary book serves as a valuable resource for everyone—from those who are just beginning their critical exploration of asexualities to advanced researchers who seek to deepen their theoretical engagements with the field.
Here's an excerpt: In her new book, Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative, memoirist Melissa Febos handily recuperates the art of writing the self from some of the most common biases against it: that the memoir is a lesser form than the novel. That trauma narratives should somehow be over—we’ve had our fill. That the hard-won wisdom and revelatory insights of the genre (its “confessions”) have been plopped onto the page like raw eggs, uncooked and without seasoning or craft. That personal narrative is necessarily indulgent and narcissistic. That memoirists have gazed so hard at their navels, they’ve buried their heads in their guts.
Febos rejects these belittlements with eloquence. To her readers, this will come as no surprise: she has made a career of searching and re-searching the self. ... In its hybridity [as a craft text-memoir], this book formalizes one of Febos’s central tenets within it: that there is no disentangling craft from the personal, just as there is no disentangling the personal from the political. It’s a memoir of a life indelibly changed by literary practice and the rigorous integrity demanded of it: “Transforming my secrets into art has transformed me.” Binding their insights to Febos’s writing life, the four essays in Body Work are, then, as much about her body of work as they are about the art of embodied writing.
This is a revised and updated edition of my first book Kill Marguerite, with many older stories revised, and some oOut now! Thank you, Feminist Press!
This is a revised and updated edition of my first book Kill Marguerite, with many older stories revised, and some of them cut to make way for six new stories. Available for preorder here: https://www.feministpress.org/books-n...
Many thanks to the following writers who offered these generous endorsements!
“Megan Milks is the most interesting prose writer working today. There! I said it. Milks smashes fiction and glues the shards back together. Milks destroys boredom! Milks stans fanfic, retells the New Narrative, lights a million candles at the altar of queer and trans experimental literature, sends love letters to Kathy Acker and Samuel R. Delany and Ovid, hate-reads Sweet Valley High in the sexiest and most disturbing ways. You will never look at Tegan and Sara—or slugs, or tomatoes—in the same way again. Be careful: this collection is a virus that will permanently change the way you read. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.” —Andrea Lawlor, author of Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
“Video game logic, middle school best friend clubs, choose your own adventure: Megan Milks both critiques and indulges in pop culture forms, often by way of viscid zoological/extraterrestrial avatars, and does so while saying profound things about trans bodies, intimacy, and vulnerability. How did they do all this? They are so cool, and I definitely want to be their friend.” —Jeanne Thornton, author of Summer Fun
"Few writers are able to surprise and thrill me like Megan Milks does. Slug and Other Stories moves from fantasy to embodiment, inventing an eroticism that explodes binaries in ways that are both destabilizing and a real turn-on." —Dodie Bellamy, author of When the Sick Rule the World...more
What a treat. Puligandla's novella imagines a smartphone that acts on your interests (and ethics) - "It guides your praxis," one character explains. "What a treat. Puligandla's novella imagines a smartphone that acts on your interests (and ethics) - "It guides your praxis," one character explains. "...Imagine if your phone shared your values, instead of prodding you with its capitalist boner all the time." It will also call you a Vantasy--"like Uber, but with shea butter hand cream and lavender laced joints, and without the anti-blackness and transphobia." Add centaur BDSM subculture and two cute queer romances - a fast read and a fucking gift. ...more
This was Marisa’s Great Idea... I jumped at the chance to team up with her on it and I’m so proud of the work we, and all our contributors, have done This was Marisa’s Great Idea... I jumped at the chance to team up with her on it and I’m so proud of the work we, and all our contributors, have done here. Baby-Sitters Club fans, we have so much tremendously good writing and art in store for you—from Kristen Arnett’s essay on role playing as BSC characters to Yumi Sakugawa’s homage to Claudia as an Asian American girl role model, from Kim Hutt Mayhew on BSC fashion to Kristen Felicetti on the series’s exploration of adoption—plus Logan Hughes on BSC fan fiction, Jamie Broadnax on the cover images’ colorism, Myriam Gurba on BSC economics and entrepreneurship, and SO MUCH MORE. Enjoy! ...more
My review is now up at 4Columns! Here's an excerpt: "The title of Torrey Peters’s first novel is in some ways a joke, the flippant imperative doublingMy review is now up at 4Columns! Here's an excerpt: "The title of Torrey Peters’s first novel is in some ways a joke, the flippant imperative doubling as an order of events: first comes detransition, then comes baby. It’s the first of many wisecracks in this vivacious comic novel about motherhood, a book that merrily skewers straight and queer orthodoxy alike. Savvily constructed as a breakout novel, Detransition, Baby is almost certainly the most buzzed-about book in the history of transgender fiction. And it’s terrific: smart, socially generous, a pleasure, a gift." Link to full review: http://4columns.org/milks-megan/detra...
I reviewed this for 4Columns -- here's an excerpt:
When her husband’s position gets transferred out of the city, Asahi—the lead character in Hiroko OyaI reviewed this for 4Columns -- here's an excerpt:
When her husband’s position gets transferred out of the city, Asahi—the lead character in Hiroko Oyamada’s The Hole—quits her dead-end job and moves with him to his hometown. Living rent-free in a house owned by her in-laws next door, Asa finds herself adjusting to a strange new reality: now without need to work (that’s lucky—there are no jobs here), she has all the time in the world. “Endless summer vacation,” she thinks. “But it didn’t feel right.” It’s the perfect setup: for a comfortable life; for a horror story.
Winner of the prestigious Akutagawa Prize in 2013, The Hole is Oyamada’s second work to be translated into English from Japanese, both by David Boyd. In some ways it’s an extension of her first, The Factory (published in Japan in 2013), a similarly lean, hallucinatory tale perhaps best described as Kafka by way of The Office. The three employees whose stories make up that novel lose their days to rote, meaningless work in service to whatever vague entity runs the enormous complex. The unemployed protagonist of The Hole loses hers to life as a housewife with nothing to do, she says, but “waste time.”
A fast, thrilling read -- I loved the intensity and nerve and tricksiness of this book, which starts with rumors of a sexual assault and goes a long wA fast, thrilling read -- I loved the intensity and nerve and tricksiness of this book, which starts with rumors of a sexual assault and goes a long way from there, switching points of view and form (screenplay shows up a few times) as it advances. Unfortunately very straight but if you're looking for a smart, surprising feminist interrogation of rape culture in a genre-bent form with some winking sensationalism and female friendship at the core -- this is it....more
One of my favorites of the year so far! This collection of eight graphic stories is marvelous, sinister, winking, wry, full of swerves and shocks and One of my favorites of the year so far! This collection of eight graphic stories is marvelous, sinister, winking, wry, full of swerves and shocks and queer disruptions. All of these stories are committed to proliferating representation of South Asian queer femininity and among other things use the weird/uncanny to slice through and/or expose the creepy banality of contemporary gentrified Brooklyn. ...more
This collection is eerie and wry, very writerly with delicious genre flourishes. Come for the writer stuck in purgatory; stay for the writer exiled toThis collection is eerie and wry, very writerly with delicious genre flourishes. Come for the writer stuck in purgatory; stay for the writer exiled to Mars. In between there are cults and doppelgangers, murderesses and clones. Weirdness abounds. Favorite line: "The moon overhead is incredibly close now, enormous, like a nipple wanting to breastfeed my paranoia."...more
Ferocious callout of academic elitism and institutional protection of abusers -- and a complex inquiry into the stakes of writing truth, and trauma. AFerocious callout of academic elitism and institutional protection of abusers -- and a complex inquiry into the stakes of writing truth, and trauma. Amber Dawn's new collection is equal parts devastating and uplifting, and includes some of her boldest and most structurally exploratory poems.
First lines (from "The Stopped Clock"): I was costumed in a white tiger striped bodysuit when I found out I'd been accepted into the graduate creative writing program at the University of British Columbia. The bodysuit was one size too small and my labia majora squeezed out from either side of the gusset whenever I sat down. ...more
My review is up now on 4Columns. Here's an excerpt:
An important philosopher-theorist of gender and sexual politics for more than two decades now, PreMy review is up now on 4Columns. Here's an excerpt:
An important philosopher-theorist of gender and sexual politics for more than two decades now, Preciado is also an electrifying writer: capable of packaging damning analysis, utopian vision, and flamboyant drama into one fell swoop. He also has quite a range, roving between rhetorical modes with the same itinerant impulse with which he—Spanish-born, holding graduate degrees from two US institutions, and now based in Paris—lives his life. ... The book collects more than sixty charismatic essays, mostly columns written for the French progressive paper Libération between 2013 and early 2018 (his column, “Interzone,” is ongoing). In each compact piece, he mixes lyricism and polemic, personal narrative and a transfeminist biopolitical analysis to subjects as disparate as marriage equality, the migrant crisis, human-canine love, Catalan independence, birthdays, breakups, even Candy Crush. These are hot takes, Preciado style. That they each, almost without exception, achieve considerable grace and power may excuse some of the sloppier comparisons they deploy.
Forthcoming February 2020! This book includes my 10,000-word profile on Dodie along with a talk by Andrew Durbin, an intro by curator Anthony HubermanForthcoming February 2020! This book includes my 10,000-word profile on Dodie along with a talk by Andrew Durbin, an intro by curator Anthony Huberman, and a collaborative piece by Dodie with Kevin Killian, which is I believe among the last things he wrote before he left us in June. Also some images of photos, letters, and ephemera from Dodie and Kevin's archives at the Beinecke. More on this soon! ...more
Queer feminist dystopian YA horror in the key of ANNIHILATION, pretty much all I could ask for. Some predictable plot moves but the Tox and the characQueer feminist dystopian YA horror in the key of ANNIHILATION, pretty much all I could ask for. Some predictable plot moves but the Tox and the characters it's inhabiting are exciiiiting. ...more