From the Archives:

Hauntings

Breaking the Back of the Classics: Fanbinding and the Beautiful Book

In 2008, the publishing giant Penguin Random House launched their Penguin Clothbound Classics (PCC) series, featuring attractively bound copies of the English literary canon. The books are affordable collectibles with a clear aesthetic formula: linen hardcovers,…

Story Time: West Hollywood’s New AIDS Monument

I first noted its edges out of my peripheral vision five days before Christmas. Twoish days later, I took in some of its luminescent glow from across San Vicente Boulevard, the sounds of queer excess and…

Traces of the Self: An Interview with Eric Schmaltz

Eric Schmaltz’s latest poetry collection I CONFESS (2026) documents the poet’s experience of undergoing a lie detector test. At once intrigued and unnerved by this extractive method of truth production, Schmaltz set out to explore its poetic possibilities.…

Review of Sophie Calle’s Take Care of Yourself

The break-up letter—in all its melodramatic glory— is not only a stinging force of creative inspiration (Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms may have never been penned if not for World War II nurse Agnes von Kurowsky’s…

Jana Sterbak: Dimensions of Intimacy at Esker Foundation

During my visit to Jana Sterbak’s retrospective on opening night, I did not immediately recognize the famed “meat dress,” Vanitas: Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorectic (1987). The flank steak from which the piece was stitched…