Litscope: Leo & Marie-Helene Bertino’s ‘Parakeet’
Just as Leo's bold personality can be a lot to process, so is 'Parakeet'
This month’s book, Parakeet by Marie-Helene Bertino, is what I call a handful.
Media & Literature Page 9
‘I Got a Monster’ as a Cautionary Tale of Cop Counterinsurgency
Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg talk about corrupt cops and the craft of writing collaboratively
In the book, I Got a Monster: The Rise and Fall of America’s Most Corrupt Police Squad, authors Baynard Woods and Brandon Soderberg critically examine the tales of terror and havoc wrought by the BPD in a previously unseen way.
Litscope: Cancer & All Boys Aren’t Blue
Finding Cancer's courage to leave its protective, outer crab shell
The challenges of Blackness and queerness are central in this book, articulated together through the lens of family.
Quarantine Diaries: Literati
Heidi Daniel, Carla DuPree, Aaron Henkin, Peter Devereaux, and Sheri Booker
This edition of Quarantine Diaries focuses on five writers, editors, and literary advocates, and their strategies for surviving quarantine.
Litscope: Gemini & ‘Exit Thru the Afro’ and ‘Kim Jiyoung Born 1982’
Following Gemini's restless intellectual curiosity
Two books that highlight gender inequity and identity, intersecting in imaginative and realistic and always-necessary ways.
What’s Really Making Us Sick
On Anne Boyer’s ‘The Undying,’ Reopening America, and Capitalist Medicine
A challenging, instructive text in this period of mass illness and isolation, when it is hard to imagine a future, though we must.
Messy Sex, Both Bold and Tender, in Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness
The best queer stories acknowledge pleasure’s colorful origins, unflattering or otherwise
Each vignette is a high-wire act, teetering along the razor’s edge separating shame and desire, passion and violence, actualization and obliteration.
Litscope: Taurus and The Obama Portraits
Appreciating the Dogged Dedication and Hopeful Leadership of Taurus
'The Obama Portraits' gives an intimate look at the process, the artists who painted the portraits, and the hope Obama’s presidency provided for Americans
FOLLOWING: @jamieleecurtistaete
Speaking the language of memes, real-world visual puns reveal the tragicomedy of contemporary life
FOLLOWING is a series of profiles and interviews of the art world social media accounts that make us think, laugh, cry, love, or sometimes just “like.”
Stockists in Quarantine
Checking in with a few of the Baltimore businesses that sell our magazine
Get vintage clothing and masks delivered to your porch, pick up local coffee and charcuterie, plus ideas for keeping your children and yourself entertained with remote book clubs and story hours.
Softening Social Distancing: Poets and Listeners Connect Through ‘Phone Call’
Curated by Ginevra Shay, the project connected 22 poets and artists with 240 listeners
In this weird and surreal time of social distancing and self-isolation, a stranger’s voice can feel like a warm invitation.
The Climate Is Dreadful in Jenny Offill’s ‘Weather’
Offill delivers news of the coming doom in clear, piquant prose, arranged as glimmering diaristic fragments
Weather takes an atmospheric view of dread, from domestic to existential, that is particular to our 21st-century life.
Litscope: Aries & Susan Muaddi Darraj’s ‘Farah Rocks’
What we can learn from the intrepidness of goal-oriented Aries
Author Susan Muaddi Darraj—who is Arab American and born to Palestinian parents—is forging new ground and giving visibility to young girls from this culture.
The Internet Is Not An Archive
A conversation with experimental writer and archivist Megan McShea
Proprietary technologies and planned obsolescence collide to make data harder to extract once a file format is no longer supported, leading to a growing concern about the impact of this current “digital dark age.”
A Pandemic Reading List
Books Perfect for a Global Pandemic from Greedy Reads' Julia Fleischaker
Losing yourself in a good book is a timeless way to manage uncertainty, unease, and being cooped up in a house with the family and roommates that you love so, so, so much, but seriously can you just turn down the volume on your video games please?
The Pleasant Sonic Density of Dora Malech’s ‘Flourish’
There is something in this collection for everyone—the personal, the political, the intimate, the strange, and humorous
In Flourish, Malech's poems rarely alight anywhere near where they begin—often introducing unexpected themes into the fray.
Access to Books is Power
Heidi Daniel and the Enoch Pratt Free Library
Libraries as places of possibility regardless of social class enabled Daniel to experience a larger world outside the one she lived in and imagine a variety of prospects that life might hold for her. That capacity drives her vision for the Pratt.
Three New Books by Women for Women and Men
Fleishman Is in Trouble, Three Women, and Queenie
If there are any men who want to understand the way a woman’s mind and body works, kindly add these three books to your list.