Issues

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