Modern Promethea
I was thinking about how not all women bear children, and some of us make people in other ways.
“Frog and Toad”: An Amphibious Celebration of Same-Sex Love
A series of illustrated children’s books endures as a classic. Was it also the author’s attempt to come out? {read}
‘The Dig’ – Hiding Sutton Hoo’s women
My immediate impression after watching the film was to question why the three female leads were presented as a vulnerable, passive, with a dull ongoing focus on their fictional problems,…
Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In
The esteemed science fiction author on how we may never go "back to normal"—and why that might be a good thing
Unauthorized Bread By Cory Doctorow
For her whole life, the world had been divided into the people around her, people who knew her, and who she was. Most of those were people who wished her…
The rise of Indigenous horror: How a fiction genre is confronting a monstrous reality
Indigenous writers, on the other hand, acknowledge the mundane horror of living in a country that dehumanizes you, weaving the reality of Indigenous life with fiction to scare audiences. In…
17 Great Books on the Border to Read Instead of ‘American Dirt’
If you’ve been online in the past few months, you’ve probably seen ads for American Dirt, Jeanine Cummins’ heavily promoted new novel about Mexican-American immigration. The book was loftily blurbed…
Whatcha Reading, Michael Hobbes?, by Martin McClellan
Michael Hobbes is a Seattle-based journalist, writer, and supremely-talented untangler of our culture’s messiest cultural hairballs. He is the other half (the first being Sarah Marshall, who did this column…
The Future of Shame and Hope: A Conversation with L.X. Beckett
Not all is bad and terrible and grim in the future. Sometimes disaster means change, and change means growth, and growth means a future full of cool ideas and good-hearted…
Buried Alive!
Being buried alive was one of the most common phobias of the Victorian era. Fear of premature interment in a coffin inspired the creation of the London Association for the…