Maureen Hynes The river was sour then, not yet sweetened by soda effluent or her declarations. We were searching for a double bed over the frothing gorge in a town full of strangers who knew. A few years ago, you might have been beaten up, said a friend. Something witchlike in us though we...
Reviewed by Evelyn Deshane During an interview with Trevor Noah on The Daily Show, Laura Jane Grace addressed the title of her recent memoir, Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock’s Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, released in 2016. Her response to Noah was similar to her response on The Late...
Reviewed by Asam Ahmad In Nick Comilla’s Candyass, a novel that stops tasting sweet about halfway through, an adolescent punk kid from a small town in Pennsylvania narrates his sexual coming of age and various experiences with gay life in Montreal and New York City. Purporting to be a novel that...
Patri Wright All the years gone wrong, in a blindfold pin-in-the-map sort of place. No day trip or retreat, more like a sun-drenched fire escape. First an Italian ice cream parlour, let time circle a while, peer down pipe-smoke boulevards, let the seafronts blend into one another. The lives...
Allyson McOuat I am femme. I know this because my feet hurt. All the time. And I like it. I gain my strength from the power that emanates from my stiletto heels. If my bra is not both itching me and poking me in the heart with a loose sharp metal underwire, then I am not complete. If my panties do...
Reviewed by Latonya Pennington In C.B. Lee’s Not Your Sidekick, Jessica Tran is a non-superpowered teenager who just wants to live up to her superhero lineage. Despite not having powers, she decides to take a paid internship and work for her city’s most notorious supervillain in order...
