Dustin Saunders

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The Overcoat and ...
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The Second Sex
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Kelly Barnhill
“On the farm,” she said quietly, “mothers fly away like migrating birds. And fathers die too young. This is why farmers have daughters. to keep things going in the meantime, until it’s our time to grow wings. Go soaring across the sky.”
Kelly Barnhill, The Crane Husband

“But maybe the girl from Puberty, and all naked young women in all paintings, are actually sitting there hating. Hating the painter, hating their boring gloomy life, hating the king and the president and the bishop and the prime minister and the authors and society and their own place in it. Maybe it’s not a shadow climbing the wall behind her, but smoke from the spontaneously ignited occult fire of hatred.

I’m struck by the naive notion of taking the girl home, painting clothes on her, black clothes maybe, painting her into a new framework, as the Canadian writer Aritha van Herk does to Anna Karenina in Places Far from Ellesmere. In this book, van Herk wants to save Anna from being another woman character in literary history who’s crushed by a train, and she plucks Anna from Tolstoy’s novel and gives her a new frame, a new text. She demonstrates how literature and art can tamper with their own past, create new bonds. As far as I know, no one has tried this witchcraft on Munch and his Puberty (she doesn’t even have a name), but now I want to paint or rewrite the girl in the painting, save her, save us. Because it’s definitely just as much about me, about saving myself from the position of a contemporary subject passively accepting the narratives offered it by past art, past stories about gender, expression, hierarchy. I want to save myself from nodding in acknowledgement to Munch, to 1890, from the outside, with insight, and accepting that Puberty is the mirror art has installed for me.”
Jenny Hval, Girls Against God

“I wrote about the future because I wanted to invent it. I wrote about the present so that it wouldn't obliterate me.”
Billy-Ray Belcourt, Coexistence: Stories

Hanif Abdurraqib
“I'm not especially easy to fool, but I am a romantic, which I suppose means at the right hour, I'm everybody's fool.”
Hanif Abdurraqib, There's Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension

Tony Tulathimutte
“It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so, so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face.”
Tony Tulathimutte, Rejection

year in books
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