Kaitlyn Greenidge: On Her New Novel ‘We Love You, Charlie Freeman’ and Writing Fully Realized Characters
“I think anyone can write any experience as long as they recognize that experience as part of the human condition. The problem arises when a writer uses a character’s social positionality as shorthand or for street cred.”
Carrie Brownstein on the Joys and Agonies of Storytelling
“Music writing can be very frustrating, too, but for some reason, at the end of three hours of trying to write a song, if I’m unsuccessful, it doesn’t feel quite as degrading as not being able to write a successful paragraph.”
Chinelo Okparanta: On Her New Novel ‘Under The Udala Trees’ and Being a Champion of Love
“It’s too bad that so many of us have a need to psychoanalyze love and destroy it in the process.”
A Look at the Bureau of General Services–Queer Division: New York City’s Queer Bookstore
“The primary service we provide is a welcoming and stimulating space where queers can meet and get to know each other; share our work and our ideas with each other; and encourage, inspire, and learn from each other.”
John Schuyler Bishop: The Strange Loves of Henry David Thoreau
“In all I read about him, Thoreau never really became more than the wooden icon who tramped the woods and wrote brilliant essays. But he was a living, breathing, gay man who yearned for love…”
A few bold scholars have explored the mystery of Henry David Thoreau’s love life, but author John Schuyler Bishop has now written a novel about it, appropriately titled Thoreau in Love.
Chad Harbach: The Strategies of Baseball, Friendship, and Love
“…I don’t want to try and boil down the book, but I just think there’s a whole kind of crazy spectrum of the way that men feel about each other and interact with each other that doesn’t often get described”
The Art of Fielding, Chad Harbach’s bestselling literary jock novel—named one of the NY Times’ “10 Best in 2011”— astutely maps the complicated and intense relationships of a set of baseball players at a fictional college campus.
Lambda Literary ambushes Harbach with questions on his novel’s tone, as ripe with homoeroticism as any locker room. And the author gamely replies.
Nikky Finney: Heart, Truth, and Justice
Nikky Finney is an award-winning, southern-born poet, whose critically acclaimed work is imbued with a distinct sense of lyricism and recurring themes of both social justice and communal history.
She was recently awarded the 2011 National Book Award for her latest collection Head Off & Split. Finney took some time to talk with Lambda Literary Review about her now famous National Book Award speech, shoe shopping with Condoleezza Rice, and the dividing line between art and rhetoric.
Brontez Purnell: Love, Compassion, and Rock & Roll
‘I basically wanted to do a zine that reflected what I was feeling at the time. With Fag School, I hadn’t really seen a zine or at least a personal gay zine that dealt with the difficult subject of gay sex with both humor and frank talk. It covered some real issues. Race, the condom code…”
