BOOKS
The Queer Child, or Growing Up Sideways in the Twentieth Century by Kathryn Bond Stockton
Aaron Nielsen
01.11.10
The suicide rate among queer youth is twice to four times that of their heterosexual counterparts depending on your source, and perhaps concern for that population formed the root of Kathryn Stockton's inquiry into the depiction of queer children in literature and film. But to take on such a project is inevitably to tangle with our social construction of childhood and its very problematic relationship to sexuality. Stockton, an intellectually fearless English literature professor at the University of Utah and a graduate of the Harvard Divinity School, relies on a fascinating array of texts including Georges Bataille, Peter Jackson's Heavenly Creatures, Supreme Court cases, Virginia Woolf, William Blake and Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Aaron Nielsen, a contributor to Dennis Cooper's Userlands anthology reviews.
Impossible Princess by Kevin Killian
Jesse Hudson
12.28.09
Just in time for 'Best Of' lists, 2009 has been a hell of a year for writer Kevin Killian. Heck, he's been blowing up this whole decade with some of the sharpest, wittiest, and most prodigious work of any writer in American Letters (though you still might find a lot of his words freely given in reviews on Amazon.com). As a San Franciscan for many years, it's fitting that Killian's latest collection of stories - Impossible Princess, one that mixes out-of-print material with new, darkly mature tales of desire and danger - is out on City Lights, the imprint that has defined the San Francisco lit scene for over half a century. Jesse Hudson reviews.
The Show That Smells by Derek McCormack
Jamie Gadette
12.16.09
Derek McCormack explained himself in a special guest post on author Dennis Cooper's blog: “The Show That Smells – this is what carnies and circus folk call an animal show. It’s also what I named my new novel." The second installment of a planned trilogy that began with The Haunted Hillbilly and the latest in Cooper's Little House on the Bowery imprint at Akashic, McCormack's sartorial fantasy is an appropriately seamless blend of vampires, country music and acclaimed fashion designers. McCormack has been a contributor to The Fanzine since its infancy and interested readers might also enjoy his fashion columns on the history of the sequin, Santa costumes and tragic Hollywood costume designer Vera West. Jamie Gadette, music editor of Salt Lake's City Weekly, reviews.
First as Tragedy, Then as Farce by Slavoj Zizek
Jesi Khadivi
12.06.09
In his review of Disney's High School Musical, Fanzine contributor Kevin Killian wrote of the film's male lead, "Ryan’s outfits are maybe one or two sizes too small, so that he seems to bulge in unseemly places all over. I think of that as the intellectual look. You know who has it, that kind of stuffed sausage sexiness? Slavoj Zizek of course. I could eat them both with a spoon." In her review of Zizek's approachably sized new work on the economic crisis, Jesi Khadivi, curator of Berlin's Golden Parachutes gallery, will instead leave you with images of the Slovenian philosopher's tendency to over-salivate.
Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem
Daniel Hamilton
11.13.09
Jonathan Lethem has been cultivating under "an umbrella"... "ideas about identity, culture, history, cities, and loss" since 1999's Motherless Brooklyn, Daniel Hamilton writes in this review for Fanzine. Chronic city, Lethem's latest, is "a story about storytelling", one that unloads a giant gobstopper of a plot in the author's most postmodern novel to date.