The very first dirty word I ever heard out of Edmund White’s mouth wasn’t what I expected. I was expecting the OG of Gay Literature to blurt out cocksucking, finger fucking, felching, something like the no-holds-barred vocabulary of his books. But no. The first dirty word Edmund White uttered when I met him was “pussy”. We were sitting in choice orchestra seats at a production of Uncle Vanya at New York’s City Center when the curtain rose and leading lady, Cate Blanchett, appeared. She was this close to us. Ed leaned over and twittered, “I can see her pussy” which we actually could through her diaphanous underpants. We both howled like school girls, and I could tell Blanchett heard us and sent a scathing look our way. That made me like Ed immediately. That was also the time he told me the story of “awful Lillian Hellman” who, whenever she went to the theater and had to leave her seat, would deliberately step hard on the feet of the people in her row. “A meaner woman you never met.” Ed loved telling this story and repeated it many times at his apartment cocktail gatherings.
Bodies, Bodies Everywhere
Bodies, Bodies Everywhere
(how studying art history turned me into a thriller writer)
by Laura Leffler
As a student of art history, I was taught to ignore the bodies—the many, many bodies, mostly female and mostly nude—strewn through textbooks and set on pedestals and hung from gallery walls. In art history, you see, bodies are not really bodies; they are vessels. A body is form. It is light and shadow and line and curve. It is a shape in space, a means to an end. Something to be used—to be handled—by the master.
Tonight the Harbor Belongs to Sarah Smarsh
Tonight the Harbor Belongs to Sarah Smarsh
by Ben Miller
Hyatt is a steep street & descending it you meet steep faces of those ascending, enduring the incline laced with storefronts: MVP PIZZA, JIMMY STEINY’S PUB & the NORTHFIELD BANK that is going out of business soon—workplace of teller Colleen who recently, smoking on the curb out front, described herself & her co-workers as “heartbroken about the deal.” Most of those passed are going to work or coming home from work, laden. Staten Island light now is late September butter. It softens steep looks of pain on the faces suffering the hill & who knows what else besides.
And Afterwards it Belongs to You: Why “The Old Man and the Sea” is a Great Environmental Novel
I once got in an online argument with a well-known novelist who’d written a screed in a high circulation national magazine urging people to stop reading The Old Man and the Sea. The novelist in question considered himself an environmental fiction writer and considered Hemingway’s Nobel Prize-winning novel an anti-environmental book, because it depicts the killing of a fish. At the time this struck me as exactly wrong, and it still does. Let me explain why.
Broadway Audition
Broadway Audition
by Azure Brandi
I emerge into the elevator. An old man tries to come in with me. I let him – he’s too geriatric and, I think, too gay to attempt anything. We go up to the same floor. I am heading up to a Broadway audition. Not a dance audition, not an acting audition. A movement audition. I have not encountered one of these before. I consider myself a mover. My interest is piqued.
We do, we make, we are
Performative, collaborative, immersive: SKIN hits all those marks, marks I didn’t know were there when I first wrote it, when I first began to understand what it might be like to work within a group of passionate people wanting more than anything—or almost anything, their creative and emotional mileage does vary—to make what they see in their minds and feel in their bodies become real: real enough to engage, to terrify, to galvanize an audience, people who came to see something they had never seen before.
A Synthesizer of Complexities Within the American Medical-Industrial Complex
A Synthesizer of Complexities Within the American Medical-Industrial Complex: on The Paregoric Realism of Anna DeForest
In a piece on the craft of writing published by LitHub, novelist, palliative-care physician, and neurologist Anna DeForest proffers their literary position. “The writing I admire and aim to produce works in a language that is entirely without artifice. This means, to be direct, short blunt words without flourish, minimal description, limited internality, and a lot of direct observation of the external world. I prefer to write in the first person, for the same reason, an atheist stance—there is no one outside of the story, there is no place outside from which to tell it.” Now maybe I’m just an opponent of the intentional fallacy or maybe I’m one of those ‘even documentaries aren’t capital-R “Real”’ guys reminding you that it’s all in the framing, that ‘realism’ is both the greatest and the most basic writing trick there is, that of course anything/everything within the pages of a book is invented, fabricated, subjectivized, and debatable, that even nonfiction is fiction, yet still I marvel at the miniaturist word sculptures in DeForest’s first two novels, each pocketsized hardcovers of around 200 pages —A History of Present Illness (2022) and Our Long Marvelous Dying (2024).
Reading Janet Malcolm in Yorkville
Reading Janet Malcolm in Yorkville
by Hallel Yadin
Growing up means getting better at keeping your promises to yourself. This belief dawned on me — or, more accurately, I was able to articulate it — around week three of a self-imposed project to read as much Janet Malcolm as possible. Malcolm was a longtime New Yorker staffer who took a “piercingly analytical” approach to her writing, and her body of work is rich with profiles on subjects oblivious to their own motivations.