In September 2004, Harcourt released Gifts, a new novel by Ursula K. Le Guin aimed at the young adult market. The press release I have for it states, “Gifts is Ms. Le Guin’s first novel for teens in decades. Like so much of her writing, it is beautifully crafted and […]
Seeking to corral some of the scattered parts of myself, I’ve decided to consolidate various locations for my writing and bring everything together here at my personal website under the News & Views section. (If you want to receive new posts as email, you are able to do that from […]
Little did we know, Kamala Harris’s secret weapon is laughter and joy. When Joe Biden stepped down as the Democratic nominee for President and Harris stepped up, there was, of course, a great sigh of relief from many people — with every public event, Biden had begun to look less […]
June 27 was Robert Aickman’s birthday, but I missed it. I was busy somehow. I’m often late to people’s birthdays. I don’t think Aickman minds very much, since he’s been dead for most of my life. To be honest, I was thinking it was this month. I’ve been reading Tartarus […]
Though best known as a novelist, Virginia Woolf wrote more words of nonfiction than fiction. Her nonfiction oeuvre spans six dense volumes of collected essays, six volumes of collected letters, five volumes of collected diaries, plus the book-length essays A Room of One’s Own and Three Guineas and the biography Roger Fry. […]
In June 2019, I traveled to Cincinnati, Ohio for the International Virginia Woolf Conference, which that year had a theme of Woolf and social justice. I delivered a paper titled, “Time Passes: What Do We Do with Woolf’s Offenses?” The paper was going to appear in an academic collection, but […]
In 2016, when my first book came out, I wrote an essay for the Story Prize blog titled “Why I Am Not a Poet”. It concluded: “Go out of bounds. If your true interests are those of poetry, it doesn’t matter if you’re not a poet.” That essay is something […]
Late in Joel Lane’s 2003 novel The Blue Mask, a character discusses his favorite books by Jean Genet: “I often think his scenarios are built up, not just from solitary fantasies, but from real sex. The books are a fundamental part of his love life. What he does on the […]
On Facebook, the wonderful writer Marlon James made a quick post about the difference between American and British book covers, noting, “As my British publisher once said ‘over here darling we try to sell books.’” The best example was this: Let’s just say that even though I have no interest in […]
Pride Month feels more important than ever because attacks on queer people in the United States and around the world feel more virulent than ever. The historian in me (I keep him in a chamber near my liver) has a lot of footnotes to offer to that statement, nuances and […]
A new interview with me has just been published by the Open Book Collective (which I just typed as Open Book Coolective — also true!). My friend Livy Snyder of punctum books conducted it, inspired by the conversation I had with punctum’s Eileen Fradenburg Joy last month about open access publishing and […]
Algernon Blackwood (1869-1951) is best known today for two short stories, “The Wendigo” and “The Willows”, both considered among the best works of horror, supernatural, or weird fiction in English. Not far behind those in reputation are a couple of his stories of the occult detective John Silence (especially “Ancient Sorceries”). Beyond […]