Drama Fiction Historical Fiction

The Human Zoo

A blistering new novel that follows a Filipino American journalist’s return to dictatorship-ruled Manila to research her book on tribes from a “cracklingly original” (Elle) and “singular” (New York Times Book Review) author, PEN Faulkner award-winner, Sabina Murray. Filipino-American Christina “Ting” Klein has just travelled from New York to Manila, both to escape her imminent…

Art Drama Fiction Historical Fiction History Humanities Social Sciences Suspense/Thriller Theory

Sketchtasy

Sketchtasy takes place in that late-night moment when everything comes together, and everything falls apart—it’s an urgent, glittering, devastating novel about the perils of queer world-making in the mid-‘90s. This is Boston in 1995, a city defined by a rabid fear of difference. Alexa, an incisive twenty-one-year-old queen, faces everyday brutality with determined nonchalance. Rejecting…

Adventure Art Classics Drama Essay Historical Fiction Humanities Social Sciences Theater/Play Theory

The Transvestite Achilles: Gender and Genre in Statius’ Achilleid

As we follow Achilles’ metamorphosis from wild boy to demure girl to lover to hero, Statius brilliantly illustrates a series of contrasting codes of behavior: male and female, epic and elegiac. This first full-length study of the poem addresses not only the narrative itself, but also sets the myth of Achilles on Scyros within a…

Art Classics Critique Essay Historical Fiction Humanities Journal/Diary Nonfiction Other Social Sciences Theory Uncategorized

Woolf’s Orlando and the Resonances of Trans Studies

Starting in the 1990’s, feminist and queer scholars frequently cited Woolf’s Orlando as an example of the potential of modernist experimentation to open up a space for the elliptical articulation of fluid genders and desires. This reading finds its best evidence in Orlando’s cross-dressed erotic pursuits. However, the text’s popularity has been on the wane…

Anthology Fantasy Fiction Historical Fiction History Humanities Nonfiction Reference/Guide/Manual

Cassell’s Encyclopedia of Queer Myth, Symbol, and Spirit

Did you know that in medieval French folklore a person might change sex by passing under a rainbow? Or that same-sex unions have been celebrated by peoples of the ancient Mediterranean, Africa, China, and indigenous America? Or that Sappho, da Vinci, Emily Dickinson, Nijinsky, Benjamin Britten, Mishima, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Keith Haring, Boy George,…