Daphne Sidor

It’s another morning in small-town Central Florida, and outside the local taxidermy shop stands a middle-aged woman in a nightgown and fuzzy slippers, tapping a cigarette into a coffee mug and admiring the pornographic window display she’s created with the shop’s wares. For her daughter, Jessa Morton, it’s one more thing to deal with on top of her father’s recent suicide and her less-recent abandonment by her lover, who was also her brother’s wife. So begins Mostly Dead Things, the first novel by the writer and Twitter virtuoso Kristen Arnett. Despite its raw materials, it is neither a slab of Southern Gothic nor a […]

The psychic burden of living through the Anthropocene is a first-world problem. In such a world, a wealthy nation has done more than its fair share to call the future of the earth and its inhabitants into question. Those who bear this consequence walk in terror, guilt, and rage against an injustice in which we are thoroughly implicated. The emotional temperature rises alongside the succession of headlines that chart the course of our doom.  While the pace of our destruction may be novel, the poet Sarah Blake’s vivid first novel, Naamah, suggests that these feelings are not quite new. These fears are as old as the Old Testament, where Noah and his family received the heavy gift of being appointed lone custodians of life on earth. Blake’s protagonist, Naamah, is Noah’s wife, […]

In the cultural theory circles Julietta Singh traversed in grad school, “the archive” stood for the body of work one sought to claim as one’s unique site of study, from which one would ideally launch a dazzling academic career. Now a professor of English and women’s, gender and sexuality studies, Singh has remained in academia, but her new book No Archive Will Restore You takes stock of a different kind of archive: her own body and all that has traversed its shifting boundaries. The tags on her publisher’s web-page for the book—birth, bulimia, cancer, desire, diaspora, pain, queer theory, race, robbery, sexuality, […]

An archivist is a professional obsessive with an impossible task: to collect, preserve and organize everything within one’s chosen bounds. Julietta Singh is not an archivist in the typical sense: on the contrary, she says, she has “a long history of becoming discomfortingly overwhelmed in spaces that contain masses of information.” Instead, the obsession that propels No Archive Will Restore You is the idea of the archive itself, and what it might mean to behold one’s own body—in this case, a queer, multiracial one marked by experiences ranging from bulimia to childbirth—as an archive worthy of passionate study. Her starting […]

“‘I want to sleep with a woman,’ I said. ‘But I don’t want to leave you.’” That’s the salvo that ignites the central drama of Leah Dieterich’s new memoir, Vanishing Twins: A Marriage. At the time, she thinks of herself as “straight but interested in women,” having spent her college years making out with girls at frat parties on the pretext of male titillation. As a young wife, she’s still inclined to link her queer desire to a man: “I could still be just like him—a straight person who wanted to sleep with women,” she thinks. “It let me become […]

Name: Eleanor. Age: “still not halfway to death.” Marital status: single, though recently granted a drawer of her own in her not-boyfriend’s apartment. Race: white, with the requisite sense of culpability in an age of “school shootings, murderous cops and their defenders, and remote-controlled bombings of unarmed civilians.” When we meet the title character in Anna Moschovakis’s Eleanor, or, the Rejection of the Progress of Love, she has blood on her hands—both literally, her thumb bleeding from an unspecified injury, and figuratively, dwelling on an unspecified “thing that had happened—that she had made happen, or at least not prevented from […]

Cathleen Schine’s They May Not Mean To, But They Do is a novel about reasonably pleasant people to whom nothing much happens except time, in all its ordinariness and brutality. That starts off as a weakness but, by the book’s end, turns into its core strength. Given the Philip Larkin epigram that also lends the book its title (They fuck you up, your mum and dad. / They may not mean to, but they do), one might arrive expecting a somewhat darker look at family dynamics. In truth, nobody in this story of two octogenarians and their offspring—as devoted New […]