Justin Torres is Selected for “5 under 35”
Author: Paige Cohen
October 5, 2012
A congratulations is in order for 2007 Lambda Literary Fellow Justin Torres who has just been announced as an honoree for this year’s 5 Under 35—a National Book Foundation program which “honors five young fiction writers selected by past National Book Award Winners and Finalists.” Torres, a Stegner Fellow and graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, is the author of the best-selling novel We the Animals. The book has been described as “a novel so honest, poetic, and tough that it makes you reexamine what it means to love and hurt” (O, The Oprah Magazine).
The National Book Foundation will be celebrating Torres along with four other outstanding authors—Jennifer duBois, Stuart Nadler, Haley Tanner, and Claire Vaye Watkins—on the evening of Monday, November 12th at PowerHouse Arena in DUMBO, Brooklyn NY.
For more details click here.
Book Review from 13-Year-Old Eve Kosofky Sedgwick is Unearthed
A Seventeen Magazine book review dated January, 1964 and written by a 13-year-old Eve Kosofky Sedgwick—who would later go on to be a prominent scholar and literary critic—has been discovered and is making its way across the interweb. Sedgwick is best known for her work in queer theory, “including a number of provocative—and often scandalous—readings of classic literary texts.”
From Velvet Park Media:
The godmother of queer theory and “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” regales us with various delightful reading experiences. She uses “two hankies” to get through Philip Barry’s play Hotel Universe…and we can only assume what she used those hankies for.
To read the newly-discovered review click here.
Plenitude Magazine Releases its Inaugural Issue
Plenitude Magazine: Your Queer Literary Magazine has just released it’s first issue, featuring esteemed writers Betsy Warland, Alex Leslie, and 2012 Journey Prize nominees Trevor Corkum and Nancy Jo Cullen. The electronic magazine, which supports literary fiction, nonfiction, poetry, graphic narrative and short film by both emerging and established writers, aims to “complicate expressions of queerness through the publication of diverse, sophisticated” work.
In Issue 1 readers can look forward to pieces “- from a tender story of fatherhood to a humorous look at the world of gay art porn; from Brazilian waxes to poignant love poems to genre-bending prose-poetry.”
Subscribe online and read issue #1 here.
John Waters Reads in Honor of Banned Books Week
And lastly, but certainly not least—a post in honor of Banned Books Week. City Lights Bookstore recruited film director/writer John Waters to read the “steamiest” passage from D.H. Lawrence’s banned book Lady Chatterly’s Lover. The novel was published in 1928 and being the “50 Shades of Grey of it’s time” was prosecuted for obscenity in several countries. Watch Mr. Water’s passionate reading of the once-censored content here.
[Photo: Justin Torres, image via The New York Times]
