Roxane Gay

http://www.roxanegay.com

Roxane Gay’s writing has appeared in Best American Short Stories 2012, Best Sex Writing 2012, Oxford American, American Short Fiction, Virginia Quarterly Review, NOON, The New York Times Book Review, The Rumpus, Salon, The Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy culture blog, and many others. She is the co-editor of PANK and essays editor for The Rumpus. She teaches writing at Eastern Illinois University. Her novel, An Untamed State, will be published by Grove Atlantic and her essay collection, Bad Feminist, will be published by Harper Perennial, both in 2014.

Flamingo Rampant! Gender Independent Kids Books

The amazing writer S. Bear Bergman has started a Kickstarter to fund a really exciting, much needed project: Flamingo Rampant–Gender Independent Kids Books. 

Why?

Kids’ ability to see themselves in books available to them is an incredibly valuable thing. Any parent, teacher, librarian, or caregiver will tell you that kids love books that reflect their daily experience. Kids with dogs like it when the kid in the book has a dog; kids with non-nuclear family structures cherish books in which families like theirs are shown.

Knowing this – or instinctively grasping it, as most of us do – makes it easy to see the value of children’s books with trans characters to trans or gender-independent kids (or kids with transgender family members).

More details here! This is definitely a project worth throwing a few dollars at.

Web Hype / 2 Comments
January 25th, 2012 / 2:00 pm

Reviews

The Power of Good Art

The Darlings
by Cristina Alger
Pamela Dorman Books, February 2012
352 pages / $26.95  Buy from Powell’s

From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant
by Alex Gilvarry
Viking Adult, 2012
320 pages  / $26.95 Buy from Powell’s

For the past couple months, Full Stop has invited writers like Justin Taylor, Alexander Chee, Danielle Evans, Maud Newton, and many others, to discuss the situation in American Writing. Most of the questions focus on the concerns contemporary writers face, particularly in terms of the responsibility, if any, writers have to respond to popular upheaval, social change, and the various crises our world is facing. It’s an important question–how do we write about the world we live in? The range of answers to these questions has been fascinating and they reveal the many differing opinions writers have about what we should be writing and what responsibility we have to document the world as it is changing.

I recently read two very different books, both responding to this world we live in, books that made me think about the different ways writers can approach the issues currently shaping our sociopolitical climate–The Darlings by Cristina Alger and From the Memoir of a Non-Enemy Combatant by Alex Gilvarry.

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1 Comment
January 24th, 2012 / 1:00 pm

Sunday Reading List

Over at The Rumpus, Elissa Bassist offers great advice on how to write like a funny woman.

The National Book Critics Circle has announced the finalists for their 2011 book awards.

Edith Wharton turns 150 on Tuesday and she still looks great. The New York Times gives her a nod as they talk about heiresses and social climbers and such.

Anil Dash discusses the web as a medium for protest.

On her blog, Anna Leigh Clark shared an image of the most amazing writing group that included Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, June Jordan, Lori Sharpe, and Audrey Edwards, among others. I want to know absolutely everything about this group now.

Margaret Atwood revisits The Handmaid’s Tale, which has remained in print since 1985.

Cory Doctorow’s essay about a vocabulary for speaking about the future is really interesting.

Are you watching Downton Abbey? Team Mary, right? And Edith; she is the worst. Over at The Millions, an essay about the literary pedigree of the show. Also, Shit the Dowager Countess Says and Downton Abbeyonce. You’re welcome.

Jennifer Weiner looked at the gender breakdown for reviews in the Times for 2011.

In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan wrote a… curious essay about Joan Didion that included the assertion that to really love Didion, you have to be a woman. Like I said, curious.

Roundup / 12 Comments
January 22nd, 2012 / 1:00 pm

Kama Sutra, Baby

Penguin Classics is releasing a new translation of the Kama Sutra, the ancient spiritual sex manual (yes, it’s much more than that, I know) that  people pretend to know all about when they want to impress a date. Or, maybe I saw that in a movie once. This new version, translated by A.N.D. Haksar,  has been adapted to modern lives. It’s the Kama Sutra, for the people, now featuring wit and charm.

Penguin has offered to give a copy to a lucky reader, so I’m having a contest! To enter, invent a new sexual position that belongs in the Kama Sutra. Leave your entries in the comment field. The best one wins and you have until Wednesday, the 25th. This will be fun, I hope. I’ll also throw in Running the Rift by Naomi Benaron, The Fallback Plan by Leigh Stein, and also some galleys TBD.

Contests / 27 Comments
January 21st, 2012 / 7:06 pm

The Writer as Performer

THE BELIEVER: When you were a little girl you wanted to be an actress, not a writer?

JOAN DIDION: Right.

BLVR: But you said it’s okay, because writing is in some ways a performance. When you’re writing, are you performing a character?

JD: You’re not even a character. You’re doing a performance. Somehow writing has always seemed to me to have an element of performance.

More excellence on the Believer’s new Tumblr

Power Quote / Comments Off on The Writer as Performer
January 16th, 2012 / 9:38 pm

New Year Roundup

We’ll get started with the Literary Magazine Club of discussion of Versal on January 9th. Details, here, if you’re playing along. If you want to write something about Versal, and I hope you do, please get in touch with me at roxane at htmlgiant.com. There’s a lot to talk about. For starters, what do you think about the cover?

Over at the Paris Review blog which is always entertaining, Jason Diamond writes about, among other things, “books as objects of design in clothing stores.”

The Millions has a useful list of books we can look forward to in 2012.

James Franco* sold his novel to Amazon. It’s a scandal! Or something! I mean, he’s what? Congratulations? I don’t know! It’s going to be called Actors Anonymous, and yeah…. I, there are no words. Actually, there are words. I am going to make a plot prediction. Young, “handsome” and intelligent actor named Fames Danco takes Hollywood by storm, makes quirky choices, struggles to remain authentic amidst the hypocrisy of Hollywood. After taking a starring role in a big budget movie, say, Mission Impossible 14, he joins a support group, tongue in cheek, to cope with being torn between fame and being true to himself. In the end, he finds a happy compromise by making great independent film choices that lead to many critical accolades and magazine covers. When he wins his Oscar, he thanks the Academy and the nameless members of Actors Anonymous. He also finds love. I will take bets on the accuracy of my prediction.

At Full Stop, Maud Newton takes on the situation in American writing as part of an ongoing series. As always, she is savvy and insightful.

The Rumpus is starting a print publication, where four times a month, or so, they will send you a letter. I’m excited for this. I may be writing a letter. I love getting postal mail. You should consider subscribing.

A League of Their Own is a classic sports film.

Michiko Kakatuni, Twitter, fake account, this is the future.

This movie poster really exists.

Small towns are losing their post offices and it is a real shame.

*Is anyone else disturbed by the Franco storyline on GH right now?

Roundup / 22 Comments
January 4th, 2012 / 5:00 pm

The Price of Revelation

 

This week, I read an article in the New York Observer that baffled, bothered and bewildered me. The article tells a story about Marie Calloway, a “part feminist, part fame whore,” young woman writer (pseudonymous) who e-mailed a much older Internet writer in New York she admired, told him she was coming to the city and wanted to sleep with him, slept with him, and wrote a 15,000 word “story, “Adrien Brody,” about the experience. None of that is necessarily shocking though some of the details (his relationship status, for example), make the assignation a bit sordid.

We are in the age of Internet confession. Have blog, will reveal, memoir, pixilated for a hundred random strangers to read. Or more. I wonder about the cost of confession these days, and the reach.

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Web Hype / 274 Comments
December 23rd, 2011 / 9:05 am

My Muse Is Shitty Sleep Dreams

When I am asked about my writing process I am generally vague and will say I don’t really have a process because I don’t know how to explain my process without sounding completely insane. I saw this movie once, The Muse, starring Albert Brooks, Sharon Stone, and Andi McDowell. It was terrible. He was a burnt out screenwriter and Sharon Stone convinced him she was a muse or something, and suddenly he was writing again on this script he thought was really hot shit. Even though the people around him thought he was crazy for believing in this muse, he needed that faith to keep writing. He needed to believe the inspiration came from some external influence.

Throughout history there have been many famous muses–Kiki de Montparnasse, Patti Smith, Edie Sedgwick, Amanda Lepore, figures great artists drew some kind of inspiration from. Writers have muses too. F. Scott and Zelda seemed to bring out a certain something in one another. The Brownings were clearly inspired by each other in their poetry. A lot is made of these muses and they are often as lauded as the creative types who drew inspiration for them. It’s so exciting that these muses have a certain je ne sais quoi that brings about great art and literature.

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Random / 31 Comments
December 20th, 2011 / 3:08 pm
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RIP, Christopher Hitchens.

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Richard Russo offered an opinion  on Amazon’s ill-advised price comparison promotion.  Farhard Manjoo thinks bookstores are difficult to use (?) and just hates having to get book recommendations from a human being instead of an algorithm. He simply cannot understand why everything is so much cheaper at Amazon. I am not anti-Amazon but this guy is being willfully ignorant. Amazon is pretty open about their willingness to operate at staggering losses to undercut competitors. By Manjoo’s thinking, booksellers should probably just give books away for free to compete, to benefit the greater good of affordability and convenience.

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