Coo by kaela noel5/31/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I was really sensitive, and I still am, but by the time I was a teenager, I had learned coping and numbing mechanisms. And I felt like I was the only person who had these extreme feelings about this stuff (which was not true at all! But sadly I didn’t know others like me at the time). I remember sitting in the hallway with an aide and then being sent to the library until the film was over. I began crying hysterically and had to be taken out of the classroom. It was around the same time Free Willy was shown at my school, and I couldn’t make it past the first scene with the orca being separated from his family. She asked me many questions about why I reacted so intensely to hearing about things like species going extinct, and I remember that we didn’t see eye to eye on any of it-she was really baffled. It was extreme enough that during one of our environmental study units in fourth grade, I was referred to the school psychologist. ![]()
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![]() ![]() ![]() Will there be new memoirs, essay collections, short stories, juicy novels, and knife-sharp satires? All! Kelly Link has a new short story collection (uncanny as ever), Tsitsi Dangarembga has an extended essay (urgent, powerful, and precise), Jen Beagin has a new novel (so funny it’s excruciating), and Alison Mills Newman’s Francisco is being rereleased in a new edition with a foreword by Saidiya Hartman. But will there be new books? Absolutely yes! And many are coming out in the first three months of the year. What will come in 2023 is as unknown as ever. ![]() ![]() ![]() Secret Lives is a pair of novellas about twin sisters, opposites on the surface, digging down to their deeper erotic selves–women with healthy fantasy lives should easily relate. Yet anybody familiar with author Elissa Wald’s previous work, 1995’s Meeting the Master and 2001’s Holding Fire, knows that she’s much more interested in what draws us to whips and chains ( us–you didn’t land on this page by accident) than in the particulars of how we employ them. That’s not a lot, quantitatively, for a book whose noirish cover depicts a man blindfolding a naked woman with his tie. ![]() There’s one explicit sex scene in The Secret Lives of Married Women (though to be fair, it’s worth at least ten), one toe-fetish scene, and one visit to a bdsm dungeon that minus a couple of phrases would be rated G. ![]() |