LFW

Some book titles describe. Some titles argue. Diana Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians picks a fight on the cover and dares you to disagree. The claim is simple. The literary and artistic revolution we call Modernism, the movement that gave us Joyce, Hemingway, Picasso and the rest, didn’t just happen to have some lesbians standing … Read more

In 1983, a Mohawk lesbian writer named Beth Brant edited A Gathering of Spirit, a special issue of the lesbian feminist journal Sinister Wisdom. It collected writing and art by Native women from across North America, and it became one of the first anthologies of its kind. Plenty of Indigenous women writers who are now … Read more

In August 2012, a lot of people were suddenly paying attention to women’s sports. The London Olympics had just wrapped, and the US women’s soccer team had won gold at Wembley with Abby Wambach and Megan Rapinoe on the roster. (If you’ve ever mixed those two up, no judgment. It happens to the best of … Read more

There’s a particular kind of grief that comes with an aging dog. You know the end is coming, you can see it in how slowly they get up in the morning, and you hold on tighter every day. Now add a divorce and the death of someone you love to that, all in the same … Read more

Most poetry collections are organized by theme or mood. Belinda Betker’s Phases is organized like a life. It starts with a girl at her grandfather’s funeral and ends with a drag king tearing up the stage, and everything in between follows one woman’s slow, sometimes painful route to herself. Coteau Books published it in 2019, … Read more

Here’s how Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons opens: “A carafe, that is a blind glass.” Go ahead and read it again. It doesn’t help. A carafe isn’t a blind glass, and if it is, what does that mean? Stein keeps going like this for the whole book, which first appeared in 1914. She describes objects, food … Read more