Results by title

A man is visited by his now famous ex-boyfriend, and he ponders a life that might have been. A new roommate destabilizes the close friendship between two twenty-somethings. A homesick immigrant plans an eightieth birthday party for the neighborhood grouch. A grisly crime sweeps up an unassuming history teacher, throwing him into the role of outcast.

El Paso serves as a backdrop for many of stories in this deeply human debut collection by Jonathan Ayala. Offering a portrait of contemporary gay Chicano lives, Ayala’s characters contend with the complexities found in navigating belonging, homecoming, falling in love, falling out of love, friendship, and what it means to be Mexican American in the United States today.

These thirteen emotionally rich, character-driven stories are filled with humor, tenderness, and insight into love, friendship, and community.

An enigmatic woman wanders from a pleasure mansion to a backyard wedding, upending the lives of everyone present

No one knows the woman at the wedding. Not the caterer, an easy target, succumbing to her advances. Not the pregnant bride or her tangled family, trying to spin a fairytale wedding under a melting hot summer sun. Not even the bride’s stepsister, Charlotte, who, in the middle of the night and despite her better judgment, allows this wandering wedding crasher into her car.

Crusted in dried blood and other bodily fluids, the woman exists in layers of sense and story, a nesting doll of pornographic tales in which fantasy and banality collide and blur. In this novel that is at once visceral, vivid, and spare, the uninvited guest gives each of those she meets what they want, whether they like it or not.

Here writhe distinct bodies in distinct ecstasies, echoing and defying inherited American narratives about gender, shame, and pleasure. With an edge of humor and horror, Woods explores if —and how—we consent to our own desires.
 

With the 1981 publication of the groundbreaking anthology This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa ushered in an era of Chicana lesbian writing. But while these two writers have achieved iconic status, observers of the Chicana/o experience have been slow to perceive the existence of a whole community—lesbian and straight, male as well as female—who write about the Chicana lesbian experience. To create a first full map of that community, this book explores a wide range of plays, novels, and short stories by Chicana/o authors that depict lesbian characters or lesbian desire.

Catrióna Rueda Esquibel starts from the premise that Chicana/o communities, theories, and feminisms cannot be fully understood without taking account of the perspectives and experiences of Chicana lesbians. To open up these perspectives, she engages in close readings of works centered around the following themes: La Llorona, the Aztec Princess, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, girlhood friendships, rural communities and history, and Chicana activism. Her investigation broadens the community of Chicana lesbian writers well beyond Moraga and Anzaldúa, while it also demonstrates that the histories of Chicana lesbians have had to be written in works of fiction because these women have been marginalized and excluded in canonical writings on Chicano life and experience.

When Eleanor founded Guadalupe Street Co-op in the early 1980s, she was in her mid-twenties and madly in love with her girlfriend, Meg. Together, they envisioned an idyllic grocery store owned by its workers and customers.

Forty years later, Guadalupe Street Co-op is an iconic Austin business with a loyal customer base, an antiquated business model, and a disgruntled staff. Roz, one of the store’s senior managers, is too caught up stalking her ex-wife online to notice that her girlfriend, Molly, is plotting with her coworkers to unionize. Roz also doesn’t see that Molly is not-so-secretly in a situationship with Randy, the dairy manager leading their collective.

Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the co-op’s first year and present day, as the unionization bid reaches fever pitch. The wind howls, the power goes out, and water creeps through the front door as questions of who owns the grocery store and who has a right to its future are posed. And will the workers ever be paid enough to buy the organic groceries they shelve?

“The / drugs, the page, none of it is here. That was years ago,” Daniel Barban Levin writes in his debut collection of poems, trying to create an inventory of blank spaces, to describe the persistent presence — the psychological furniture — of what no longer exists. “There was a room. I lived there. / Now, I can’t find it anymore.” 

Written in the wake of the media storm surrounding the revelation of the Sarah Lawrence cult, interrogating the constructs of confessionalism and journalistic epistemology after the release of memoirs and viral articles and a Hulu docu-series, Worms, Dirt considers the soil beneath the story playing out aboveground. These poems are a unique telling of two kinds of departure – leaving a cult and exiting a relationship. They weave together fragments and elisions of memory — “Was any of it right? Did any of it happen the way / You remembered?” — reverse engineering a story from the aftermath — “The piece you still can’t find. It must be true. He was // Gentle. Sometimes, he was gentle.” Devastating and open-hearted, these pages transcribe transformation and reconstruction of self, survival, reckoning. They confront the intimate betrayals of belonging to a high-control group or seeking love from the wrong romantic relationships. These lyrics confront horror and a fragile hope in their recognition of this inconceivable thing, the soft flesh smothered by the scar:  “The hands’ capacity / For gentleness even as you watched them, in disbelief, dismantle you.” 

Traversing New York and New Hampshire and landing in Los Angeles, Levin treats the things we leave behind as the material from which we grow. Most striking about Worms, Dirt is its lyrical metacommentary — as a book about writing a book, it constantly refuses the constraints of the imposed narrative memoir and the parasitic appetite for sensationalism, easily commodified true crime, and flattening characterizations of victims and villains. “For I am at work, writing this / For I have accrued so many reasons to live.” 

Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper’s unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade.

In this, the first book-length study of Cooper’s life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper’s fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper’s singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper’s status as a leading figure of the American post­–War avant-garde.