July 27, 2026
I loved Gibbons’ stiff sentences and strange tone—at once kitschy, pervy, ridiculous, and tragic.
No awkward fumbling in the dark, no failed maneuvers, no humiliating slurp sounds slipped out in the throes of passion—even a middle-aged beauty crowns the novice to be a carnal “king”! Have you ever heard of a more seamless first time? Then you remember this is a book written by a teenage girl who’s never been kissed, let alone had sex.
July 7, 2026
Meet us at the meadow? You promise?
Everybody started undressing but it wasn’t scary. In the dark, nobody could really see anybody else, like we didn’t have bodies. Without a body, in the presence of boys, I felt like a girl, like my ugliness was at bay.
For the penguins it was just a day
— Wait, what did he call you? Sadiya said. Julio applied everything he’d learned of hermeneutics, philology, and translation theory to give Sadiya a serviceable definition of pinche güey — It’s like [Napoleon Dynamite voice] freakin’ idiot — Is it, Sadiya said, I always fancied Chuy more a Pedro type — Wooow, Julio said, you are literally the Danger of a Single Story — Says the guy whose only exposure to South African culture was District 9 — Hey, you forgot the 2010 FIFA World Cup — I didn’t forget, I just didn’t want to relive that trauma .
He saw Cairo as a cake dripping with delights
As things stand, the field of psychiatry offers us no precise definition for such cases of fleeting madness as those experienced by Mohammed Shatta, though literature has preserved an account of the phenomenon from the perspective of one of its more notable sufferers: L’avenir dure longtemps, by the French philosopher Louis Althusser.
These are some of contemporary literature’s most malaise-afflicted, ennui-stricken women.
February 19, 2025
A marriage ends, a love affair begins
On our lunch breaks we planned a union-organizing drive for the office. We would go to this café that was small enough that we could see everyone in there (no eavesdroppers), far enough away that it didn’t really make sense to walk there and back (no one would look for us there), a little too expensive to be reasonable (too decadent for two dirtbags). “I’m a socialist, because if capitalism worked I’d be rich,” Teo explained to me after we had ordered scrambled eggs prepared with crème fraîche. “We’re friends now,” I said.
Lightning bolt. Heart on fire. Sailboat. Statue of Liberty.
Just once in her life she shot a gun, when she was in the Venture Scouts, aged 16. It was at the Thiepval Barracks a few months before she took her GCSEs. The army must have been trying to recruit them or something. As if. The army guy, who’d shown her how to shoot the gun, looked like Travis Bickle prior to the mohawk. She’d fancied him slightly. They didn’t converse.
I’m as beautiful as this fish?
“I only love swimming,” I said. And it was true that I’d always felt awkward on land. Sometimes I wondered if that was why I was so unsuccessful at online dating: technology was incompatible with the water. “The monk thing does appeal.”
October 8, 2024
Newark's queer lives
In media and popular culture, Newark has long appeared as irredeemably unsexy, violent, destitute. “Queer Newark reclaims Newark,” Strub declares defiantly, “as a place of desire, love, eroticism, community, and resistance.” The book snuffs out the dominant view of the city, one ethnography and endnote at a time.
We must be reading different Junots, I said. You’re still reading Junot, she said.
I will hang out with basically anyone for as long as I can — what else to do with myself?
He uses his own body like an ATM
At every meeting I raise the amount, first one hundred and fifty, then two hundred, then two hundred and fifty—to erase his apathy, to wrest from him a jolt of interest or at least greed; but after just a few days he gets comfortable with the new state of affairs (which is destroying me economically, and much more quickly than I had foreseen), he mentally registers that he’ll make more from me and he takes it for granted from that moment on.
