SS: You seem busy, Tade! Your debut Making Wolf won the 2016 Kitschies Golden Tentacle Award; Rosewater is out this fall; your novella GNAW is coming in December. How do you find, or make, the time? TT: When you make sleep optional there are…
In Ann Leckie’s novel Ancillary Justice (Orbit Books: 2013), the imperial Radch rules over much of human-inhabited space. Its culture – and its language – does not identify people on the basis of their gender: it is irrelevant to them.…
Looking about the shelves for books that are not there, you suggest a supplement to history. History’s queer enough already, isn’t it? Unreal. Lop-sided. You speculate, provide an example, and discover you’re spinning a romance. Speculation must always be romance,…
An experimental review of War, So Much War by Mercè Rodoreda Translated from the Catalan by Maruxa Relaño and Martha Tennent Open Letter Books, November 2015 The critic’s father had been dead a little more than four years. As…
“I mean to survive” –Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower At the heart of Octavia Butler’s Survivor (1979) lies a forgettable rape scene: He covered me with the thick, very soft blanket of his fur and hurt me as…
Spotlight 1 In 1988, Gallaudet University elected another hearing president. The students of Gallaudet believed that the time had come for a deaf person to run the university for the deaf and hard of hearing—they created the Deaf President Now protest…
This is the story I tell myself: Once upon a time there was a little girl who went wandering in a wood in the sweetness of springtime. She came to a well and leaned far down to see her reflection,…
1. In most video games you never quite reach the edge of the world. Walls, sure, or places where the trees become impenetrable, where bitmaps strain towards pixellation. But here I am falling. Down down through soft empty space.…
Otherwise. Otherwise than this. To begin here in the otherwise, as the otherwise, is to pose a question about tears born in dreams. Ever wake with tears in your eyes? Or down your cheek? Those tears serve memorial. Those tears…
Someone had turned in six albums to the store, thick as dictionaries, each full to bursting with slivered photos askew in their pockets. There were eight or nine of every setup; Chester the photographer took no chances. Each was…
