In Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature (2025), literary studies scholar Emma Bond forays into urgent debates concerning the future of public museums. On its face, a literary theorist’s intervention in museum studies discourse—and operational museology at that—might…
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Aaron Cobbett’s analog camera immortalized queer nightlife in Manhattan’s East Village through fabulous photo shoots that both rivaled contemporary fashion editorials and rejected the fashion world’s unattainable beauty ideals. Most…
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,…
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…
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.…
Anthony Petro’s Provoking Religion: Sex, Art, and the Culture Wars brings forward a significant counternarrative of the role of religion in American art during the 1980s and 1990s. This period is frequently narrated as the “Culture Wars”: a…
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…
Displacement, Paul Liam observes in a review-essay, is a central aesthetic in the poetics of diasporic writers, either subconsciously or not, in such a way that the exiled writer is constantly questioning their “belongingness to a…
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…
