Since Harold’s partner died first,I’m gifted his antique Flow Blue teapot,sugar, creamer, which I keepnext to the porcelain pitcher wheremy father’s wooden paintbrushes showtheir bristles like little bud-brooms.These sit atop a thick, large navy splatter-ware plate I threw at Benningtonmore than forty years ago.What remains? I recall the feel of wet clay, sitting at the wheel, centering myself.
Brooms! Buckets! Açai! Mangos! Melons! Bootleg CDs!Bikinis on mannequins that look like sex dolls dancing in open air.The coconut man’s at his stand, grinding the flesh into piles of snow.He asks me to marry him and as I consider,an elderly couple trundles by with a load of root vegetables.Their frayed plaid jackets match, their arms are wrapped aroundeach other’s waists. You could just tell she’d given birthto several babies, now grown and living in distant
Cremation in Mexico Our father, lying face-up in his linen jacket and good pants on the black rubber assembly-line conveyer belt that was jerking toward the furnace in this outdoor industrial yard on the outskirts of the city—where who knows what was disposed of—no plush chairs, background music orundertaker nodding solemn in his suit but only this gravel ground and a conveyer belt so narrow our father barely fit—and as it moved his body slipped—my
The first thing Jamie Hood tells us in Trauma Plot is when she began to write her memoir: 2016, a year after she had been gang-raped by five men, a month before Trump was first elected. She is quick to point out that “this framing misdirects” because it draws too causal a relationship to that moment and the following decade, which also witnessed the #MeToo movement and its implosion. The ensuing distaste for the “trauma
As prolific a writer as Sarah Schulman is—eleven novels, nine works of nonfiction, several plays and scripts—it is her role as a teacher that anchors her new book, The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity. She writes about how an open-admission process at CUNY Staten Island, where she taught for many years in the English Department, helped her to develop a skill that has been invaluable to her as an activist: the ability to journey with
I still vividly remember the first time I watched a horror movie. I was the kind of kid who gave herself hand-blinders in Blockbuster so I didn’t have to see the VHS cover of The Ring, and by the time I grew out of that, contemporary horror was mostly torture porn, deeply unappealing. I made it into my twenties before I willingly consumed my first scary movie: It Follows. I remember it was 2016—because my
Here’s a confession: I’ve never made it through more than a few pages of The Catcher in the Rye,which has resulted in some sheepish sidestepping when I am asked to speak in my capacity as an author of young adult fiction. Admittedly this came up more frequently in the years when publications ran hand-wringing think pieces about why adults were reading so many books written for teenagers (simpler times, those were), usually when a grown
I’m on a live theater kick, so I caught Trophy Boys during its off-Broadway run last summer. The play depicts four male debaters as they decompensate during the seventy-minute (or so) prep session they have before their final match against an all-girls school. The red-hot prompt they have to defend? “Feminism has failed women.” The boys are played by female, queer, trans, and nonbinary actors. Emmanuelle Mattana, the playwright and a lead actor of Trophy
Mercedes Matter, Untitled (Main Landscape), c. 1957, oil on board, 16 × 20 in., Estate of Mercedes Matter, courtesy of Berry Campbell Gallery, New York. “A young person studying art today steps into a particularly confusing situation,” wrote Mercedes Matter in 1963. “The extraordinary kaleidoscope of events of the twentieth century, of movements following so closely one upon another, of extremes absurd and great, of ideas canceling each other out and recurrent Dada and anti-art,
Presented by the Japan Society and Metrograph, New York City, 2025 Mikio Naruse. Photo © Toho. In the United States, the term “women’s picture” generally refers to a film, released between the 1930s and the end of the century, with a melodramatic story concerning women’s emotions, presented from a woman’s point of view. The melodramas are often exaggerated in their details of relationships, and the most important relationships tend to be between women. They rarely
