The American Novel Has a Major Problem With Fat People
To read contemporary American fiction is to swim through a sea of fatphobia so normalized that it is almost never remarked upon in book reviews, and those who perpetuate it…
Oops: 250000 people came to your book club
In fall 2023 I got to do some IRL events around the country at bookstores, libraries, and some other fun Drac-adjacent spaces. Here's the talk I gave (when possible) about…
Grieving a Friendship w/MariNaomi
Join host Ned Buskirk in conversation with award-winning author & illustrator MariNaomi, talking about their new & ninth book, I THOUGHT YOU LOVED ME, a collage-comics graphic memoir about a…
How to build a planet
We’re going to tackle a few very small questions in this episode, like how to build a planet from scratch – and then, how to build governments on that planet.…
9 Books About Being Unemployed and Underemployed – Electric Literature
Elizabeth Gonzalez James, author of "Mona at Sea," recommends stories about struggling under capitalism. {read}
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…
Thirst Trap by Jason Diamond
Bukowski imagines himself among the Rimbauds and Pounds, and that grandiosity is one reason he continues to attract fans—not necessarily readers—drawn to the image of the writer as the dirty-talking…
Subversive, queer and terrifyingly relevant: six reasons why Moby-Dick is the novel for our times
But it is Moby-Dick’s premonitory brilliance that continues to make it relevant. Melville predicts mass extinction and climate breakdown, and foresees a drowned planet from which the whale would “spout…