After its massively successful streaming release last November, Emerald Fennell’s film Saltburn dominated cinematic discourse for months. A 2006-set period piece that starts as a 21st-century Brideshead Revisited and morphs into an ironic erotic thriller, its carefully honed aesthetic, plot twists, and off-kilter sexuality divided critics and audiences. Some lambasted the film for lacking subtlety; others admired its dark humor and transgressive sexuality. The “Saltburn discourse,” though, left out some of the film’s key features: Fennell embeds a complex set of influences, and conscious riffs ..read more

In the Summer of 2017, I went to see the European premiere of the Braden Jacobs-Jenkins play An Octoroon. Based on the 1859 melodrama by the Irish playwright Dion Boucicault, it was staged at the Orange Tree Theatre in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames. A truly bombastic production that lampooned the tropes of the “tragic mulatto” story in a way that was confrontational, incredibly inventive and tonnes of fun. Sparked up by what we had just watched, the biracial man who was my date for the night, regaled me with the tale of his adoption by white parents in the North of England over a ..read more

Click to enlarge The post For This Mexican Writer, Magical Realism Is a Craft Tool for Dissecting the Drug Wars  appeared first on Electric Literature ..read more

“A Salad-Eating Competition” by Billy Lezra THEY SAY NOTHING TASTES AS GOOD AS SKINNY FEELS, BUT After Kate Baer have you tried duck-egg soaked brioche French toast, golden crisp edges doused in caramelized maple syrup? have you licked a spatula coated in vanilla bean whipped cream? have you soaked up oceanic Pinot Grigio brine with toasted baguette after polishing off a bowl of mussels? have you allowed the thick cream of drinking chocolate to coat your tongue? have you baked the strawberry rhubarb pie passed down from your great-grandmother? have you dined solo in Rome, read love poems to yo ..read more

For a country that isn’t much larger than a thumbnail on most globes, Britain has an outsized cultural footprint. This is, of course, in part because the footprint used to be a big clobbering boot, kicking in the doors of other people’s countries without even wiping the blood and mud off on the mat. When I started writing my debut novel, The Ministry of Time, I mostly wrote it as a vehicle to bring my favourite 19th-century polar explorer, Graham Gore, into the 21st century, so I could shove him into situations and make him wriggle. (When you have a crush on a dead man, there’s not much else ..read more

River, Love “What will become of my work?” – Clara Schumann, after learning she’s pregnant with her fifth child I. Her hands on the piano are birds she cannot name. It’s April 1854 in Düsseldorf, rain and rain and flooded streets. Whenever Clara leaves the house to shop, she wades through water ankle-deep. Two months ago, her husband Robert was hospitalized following his most recent breakdown. He has stopped composing; Clara and the children are running out of money. She lifts her hands to her face, holds it—scent of onion she cut earlier. II. She’s born in Leipzig, 1819. That year bicyc ..read more

My mother tells me stories of a woman on the moon. When she first heard the story, she was a little girl in China, sleeping at her aunt’s house beside the river, banana trees thrashing with night storms. When I first heard the story, I was in my parents’ bedroom in the American midwest, the quiet night punctuated by the neighbor’s howling dog. Separated by time, by culture, by distance, by language, my mother’s stories are handed to me fragmented, and I am tasked to put them back together.  As a second-generation daughter of immigrants, I am often saddened by the stories that will be fore ..read more

Early sobriety is a very unique, specific flavor of life in which you suddenly have yet to catch up with the exterior world. You’re a skinned grape rolling around among others who’ve grown safe, comfortable exoskeletons in the time you spent drinking. How did they do it? How do they do it? How do I do this—and can I, really? These are some of the questions explored in Michael Deagler’s debut novel, Early Sobrieties, and questions that I, who also got sober in Philly, like Deagler’s narrator, and Deagler himself, acutely remember wondering.  Early Sobrieties follows 26-year-old Dennis Mon ..read more

When I first decided to write my novel, Their Divine Fires, I knew I wanted to draw on and honor the stories of my grandmother and mother. In the early 1900s, my grandmother’s uncles joined the Communist Party and fought to protect their country against warlords and Japanese soldiers. Decades later, my mother witnessed the Cultural Revolution and lived through the vast social and political changes that were brought about as a result. I grew up with these stories, stories of resistance and revolution that shaped how I understood who I was and my own place in history.  Much like the storie ..read more

Football (or soccer) has always been a significant part of Ellen van Neerven’s life; they grew up playing the game, advanced to become an amateur player, and has always been what they call an “armchair enthusiast” of the sport. But EvN, the author of Personal Score: Sport, Culture, Identity, who presently lives in Brisbane, Australia, has not experienced only joy in their participation in sport. Instead, their love for the game was—and is—complicated.  As someone who identifies as queer, non-binary, and is of Mununjali Yugambeh and Dutch heritage, EvN, throughout their formative years, b ..read more