Books

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Book Review: ‘Signs Point to Yes’ by Sandy Hall

On the surface, Signs Point to Yes (Swoon Reads) is seemingly a fluffy, feel-good romance. The book shifts third person perspectives between that of Jane, her sister Margo, and Jane’s crush Teo. You might never know it from the flowery genre-typical cover, but inside this book is more diversity than you’re likely to find in your average young adult romance novel. Jane blows off an unpaid internship secured by her mom to nanny three girls who coincidentally are the sisters of her long-time crush, Teo. Jane is floundering the year after her high school graduation. Unsure of a college or major, […]

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Book Review: When the Sick Rule the World’ by Dodie Bellamy

Dodie Bellamy’s collection of essays, When the Sick Rule the World, immediately hooks the reader with a disarmingly funny and libidinous reading of a scene from a classic animated film. The effect is one of being grabbed by the wrist and dragged, willingly, into a series of dark and deeply felt vignettes that address with lyrical precision such topics as the death of the author’s mother, Kathy Acker’s abandoned possessions, the cult of the guru, and the cannibalization of San Francisco by the tech industry. By the end of the book, Bellamy has managed to create, by virtue of colliding […]

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Book Review: ‘The Pink Trance Notebooks’ by Wayne Koestenbaum

Wayne Koestenbaum’s latest, The Pink Trance Notebooks, is a difficult book to review—but in a very good way. In fact, it would be difficult, in the space of a traditional review, to do justice to a single of its poems, or “trance notebooks,” each its own luxuriant collection or collage of pithy observations, speculations, reports, notations, aphorisms, and epiphanies. The collection is apparently the result of a year-long hiatus from journal writing in favor of this more immediate, unfiltered transcription of a mind at work in and on itself. But beyond the circumstances of their composition, there is a particular […]

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Book Review: ‘Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home’ by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha

Every cell of my body. Naked and tough, something new and beautiful, adorned. Learning these streets and how to walk down them. Learning how to find red silk in a  bargain bin, to tighten straps, to walk. To meet the eyes. To swish my ass, to insist in the pleasure of thighs brushing together, glaring, I will fucking kill you if you look at me. I would fall into bed, exhausted. –Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha A few years ago, I saw Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha read at Culture Fuck, and Oakland-based POC/Mixed reading that happens on a monthly basis. She had just […]

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Ten Great Books To Get You Through The Holiday Season

  The holidays are upon us, which means you’re likely going to spend a lot of time traveling over the next two months, not to mention avoiding that conversation about Donald Trump back home in Ohio with Aunt Sally you have been studiously avoiding. To make matters easier, and more enjoyable, we’ve compiled a list of reading recommendations. Whether you’re in the mood for some serious literary fiction, a juicy biography, a funny memoir, or a thoughtful work of nonfiction, here are all the bases. Scissors, Paper, Rock: A Novel by Fenton Johnson Along with his siblings, Raphael Hardin left his childhood home in rural […]

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Book Review: ‘Trans’ by Juliet Jacques

At the beginning of Trans, Juliet Jacques described her experience with bottom surgery. She writes about meeting another trans woman, Billie, in the hospital. They talk intensely about poetry and join in a small rebellion, secretly disconnecting Jacques’ catheter so she sneak off to watch soccer. This vivid and engaging vignette left me wanting to know more about these characters, about what happened next in their lives. Although this vignette seems like a beginning though, it is really an end. Instead of moving forward from this point, the book immediately jumps back to Jacques’ childhood. Jacques describes growing up in […]

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Book Review: ‘Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl’ by Carrie Brownstein

The debut memoir from Sleater Kinney member and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl is a whip smart and compelling story that expertly blends music writing with personal revelations. At turns heartbreaking and illuminating, Brownstein’s immense talent has produced an intimate portrait of America’s best rock band. The memoir opens with a scene from Sleater Kinney’s penultimate tour, before the band made an abrupt farewell in 2006. Sick with shingles, unhinged by anxiety, in one scene, Brownstein lets us into the carefully guarded world of Sleater Kinney. From there, she illustrates her childhood in the Pacific […]

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Book Review: ‘Uncovered: How I left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home’ by Leah Lax

At a writers’ conference, Nancy Bereano, the publisher of Firebrand Books from 1985-2000, suggested that the current popularity of memoir as a genre could be traced to the work of feminist writers and feminist publishing. I agree. Feminist writers changed the memoir and creative non-fiction and Bereano’s Firebrand Books was on the cutting-edge of these changes. Bereano published Mab Segrest’s My Mama’s Dead Squirrel, Minnie Bruce Pratt’s S/HE, Beth Brant’s Food and Spirit, and Barrie Jean Borich’s first collection, Restoring the Color of Roses. Each of these books altered how readers understood story-telling, including what stories are worth telling. One […]

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Book Review: ‘Alexander McQueen: Blood Beneath the Skin’ by Andrew Wilson

How difficult it must be to write a biography of a recently deceased person who was often called the ‘best of his generation’ and a ‘creative genius’; even more so in this age of instant information where video and audio evidence of an artist’s craft is prevalent. In his tightly-researched book on Alexander McQueen, Andrew Wilson pieces together, with panache and ease, the fractured selves of the brilliant British designer who rose from the working-class, East-end of London to the pinnacle of Parisian high-fashion. The title, Blood Beneath The Skin, perfectly describes the grit below his surface and how readily […]

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New Memoir Explores Black Gay Experience

Born to a 14-year-old mother, raised in a household with an alcoholic grandfather, Jarrett Neal was in eighth grade when his gym class accidentally walked in on their coach showering. It was Neal’s first glimpse of a naked man and it “ended my boyhood,” he writes in “What Color is Your Hoodie: Essays on Black Gay Identity.” He was well into college when he finally admitted to himself that he was attracted to men; still, the “daily taunts” from his more athletic, more self-confident peers and the absence of a father haunted him for many years. To counteract it, Neal […]

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