“The last two years have given long overdue visibility to trans / non-binary realities, pushing us to re-imagine what centering the margins truly means. Being intentional, though, is more than a special issue of a literary journal for the ‘marginalized;’ it’s about creating a space for folk to curate, create, and declare their own bodies: of work, of resistance, of survival.” Editor Jayy Dodd introduces the new issue of The Offing, devoted to trans and non-binary artists. Pair with our own Sonya Chung’s piece on literary activism.
All Voices Must Be Heard
2012 Hugo Nominees — For Free!
John Scalzi rounded up online versions of all of the stories nominated for this year's Hugo Award. Read up!
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Do They Get Screeners?
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The Best of Young Brazil
“Tracing the journey of a mediocre actor and Holocaust survivor ‘touched by some mysterious higher design’ as he forges and impersonates his way through the war and then back to the city of his birth, the story is part Samuel Beckett and part Isaac Bashevis Singer, with a sudden final bolt of O. Henry. It has the flavour of a morality tale, but what’s most fascinating to me is how difficult it is to derive a moral from it, or rather how easy it is to derive more than one and how openly they stand in conflict with each other.” Kevin Brockmeier extols the fiction of Leandro Sarmatz.
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My Ears! My Ears!
In a move that could scar you for life, Gilbert Gottfried reads selected passages (Very NSFW!) from E L James’ breakout book Fifty Shades of Grey.
Bad Review Bingo
Print out your playing cards and start sifting through the comment sections of negative book reviews. It's a new game called "bad review bingo." (inspired in part by the frothy commenters to our own Janet Potter's blistering review of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy.)
A Cartoon Quixote
Well, Cervantes's body was just found, and there are some varying opinions about whether or not that's a great thing for Spain and Spanish literature. What is almost definitely not a great thing for either: the pornographic Spanish Don Quixote cartoon from the seventies.
“Everything goes and nothing matters.”
Recommended Reading: "When Literature Was Dangerous," a history of censorship and the development of a culture "in which literature lacks urgency" and, perhaps, significance.
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