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In 1979, a group called Women Against Pornography opened an office in what was then, in the organizers’ view, the belly of the beast: Times Square. WAP members, predominantly white feminists, who believed that porn had the power to reinforce, and even breed, misogyny, led others who shared their views on eye-opening tours of the […]
How Candida Royalle Set Out to Reinvent Porn Read More »
It was indeed a “normal” election in that respect, responding not least to the outburst of “normal” politics with which Hitler had littered his program: he had, in the months beforehand, damped down his usual ranting about Jews and bankers and moneyed élites and the rest. He had recorded a widely distributed phonograph album (the
The Forgotten History of Hitler’s Establishment Enablers Read More »
In your story “Neighbors,” a couple moves west to San Francisco in the wake of an infidelity, hoping to “redraw the map” of their marriage. While they are there, the husband has an eerie encounter in a neighbor’s house. These two strands of the narrative are seemingly unrelated, but, of course, this is a crafted
Zach Williams on Making a Story Travel Read More »
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Zach Williams reads his story “Neighbors” from the March 25, 2024, issue of the magazine. Williams is a Jones Lecturer in fiction at Stanford University. His début story collection, “Beautiful Days,” will be
Zach Williams Reads “Neighbors” Read More »
“It seems as if the rest of the country is perpetually in the act of discovering us,” Marie Arana writes in a new book, “LatinoLand: A Portrait of America’s Largest and Least Understood Minority.” It is equally true that an overwhelming amount of the cultural production about Latinos (books, news-media coverage, even the National Museum
Who Are Latino Americans Today? Read More »
In “The Book of Love,” a début novel from the short-story writer Kelly Link, three teen-agers find themselves in their music teacher’s classroom in the middle of the night. They are wearing costumes from “Bye Bye Birdie,” and they remember only “a blotted, attenuated, chilly nothingness” from which they’ve slipped “one by one by one,”
Kelly Link Is Committed to the Fantastic Read More »
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly cultural-recommendations newsletter. For centuries, the bildungsroman, or novel of education, has offered a window into a formative period of life—and, by extension, into the historical moment in which it’s set. Vinson Cunningham sent the draft of “Great Expectations,” a
The New Coming-of-Age Story Read More »
A novel with the title “Martyr!” arrives on the scene preloaded and explosive. The word is fraught, even more so now than when the book’s author, the Iranian American poet Kaveh Akbar, chose it. There’s humor in the exclamation mark, but there’s something else, too. It signals that Akbar is fascinated with words in action,
“Martyr!” Plays Its Subject for Laughs but Is Also Deadly Serious Read More »
Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Joseph O’Neill reads his story “The Time Being” from the March 18, 2024, issue of the magazine. O’Neill is the author of one story collection and four novels, including “Netherland,” which won the
Joseph O’Neill Reads “The Time Being” Read More »
The Roman god Janus was possessed of two faces, one pointing toward the future and one looking backward into the past, and it is tempting to imagine that these faces must also have worn contrasting expressions, one brighter and hopeful, the other rueful or even aghast. Supposing you knew such a person, how would you
How an Enthusiast of Soviet Socialism Fell Afoul of the Authorities Read More »
