Hello readers,
This year, I did much less than I normally do in terms of shorter publications. I wrote a number of introductions, for the new edition of Sam Chang’s debut collection Hunger; for the new translation of Natalia Ginzburg’s novella Valentino; and for a new edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. I completed a major review that will be out shortly. I launched this newsletter. And I sold a novel.
Other People’s Husbands will be published in 2025 by Mariner, my publisher for my three other books, and by Penguin Random Canada. It was not the book I thought would come next, born of a secret side project novel written to make myself laugh during some hard times that eventually surged ahead of my other projects. A comic queer campus novel about the uneasy act of joining your former mentors as a peer or an heir or both, it is also, yes, as the title suggests, about narrator’s habit of borrowing of other people’s men—married men—and he usually really does put them back. He learns a great deal this way and then finally meets a husband he wants to liberate.
The novel is also about some territory that I feel queer fiction has yet to really explore.
If you are a founding subscriber, please send me your mailing address in advance of 2025 so I can send you a signed first edition. I will be reaching out also.
Speaking of subscriptions, Substack has replied to us about their stance on Nazis. They believe they’re siding with free speech, despite the longstanding tradition of Nazis and Fascists exploiting the free speech “argument” with liberals to bring about their destruction. Substack also defends their censorship of pornography at the same time. As someone who is considered an abomination by Nazis for being mixed race, and whose work has been banned for its sexual content over the years, I’m moving this newsletter, exploring options with my web master and will announce the move soon. Please be reassured: All of the moves I’m exploring would migrate your subscriptions.
For all of you New York readers, I will be passing through town next week for a Books Are Magic event for Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words anthology, already in a third printing before it has officially published.
And now, for some readings:
I’m close to done with Isabella Hammad’s new novel Enter Ghost. Set in Palestine in the summer of 2017, a Palestinian actress named Sonia leaves London to visit her sister in Haifa, and finds herself drawn into a West Bank production of Hamlet staged in formal Arabic. This may not sound like a particularly political performance the novel is in many ways about why this is so. I find the novel an engrossing, intricate performance, absolutely riveting, hard to read slowly but I am all the same.
Hammad’s conversation with Sally Rooney at the Guardian last month on this awful second Nakba underway is a profound exchange.
Louis Staples recently opened a door in this essay in Harper’s Bazaar on All Of Us Strangers that leads to much of what my new novel will be about.
I was blown away by Kathleen Alcott’s tremendous personal essay “Trapdoor,” at Harper’s.
Writing fiction is a recursive disavowal, a psychic chase that requires moving between what is known about the self and where you vanish when you refuse to know it.
Garth Greenwell’s gorgeous introduction to Dancer From The Dance, by Andrew Holleran, is up at the Yale Review.
“Queer aesthetics” is a difficult concept to pin down, maybe because one of its constitutive elements is an allergy to definitions. In fact, what’s exciting about the voices that open Dancer is the clash of radically different, and differently queer, aesthetics. The first letter writer—his name, Paul, is revealed at the very end of the novel; his correspondent is never named—speaks with rhapsodic excess, the overripe lushness of a Tennessee Williams heroine. His first letter is a paean to springtime in Florida: “At this instant a rust-red moon is hanging low above the water lilies on the lake, and the leaves of the live oaks gleam in its light. . . . Everything is in bloom, azaleas and dogwood, the air is soft as talcum powder.” His New York correspondent, who has abandoned himself even further to the gay world, having quit his job and living now as a sex worker, turns this on its head: “Sunday afternoon I walked down the steps off Columbus Circle into Central Park, and the odor of piss rose up from the rest rooms, and I knew a year had passed.”
There is a Ukrainian “I want to live” hotline for Russian soldiers who want to surrender instead of participating in the Soviet-era “human wave” attack strategy currently being deployed.
Science writer extraodinaire Sabrina Imbler wrote about getting top surgery when you have a family history of breast cancer.
Isaac Chotiner’s New Yorker interviews related to Israel and Palestine have been essential reading, and this week’s interview with the chief economist of the World Food Program on the starving of Gaza is especially important.
A new London episode is coming tomorrow.
Thanks for updating us about the substack response. I'm not on here much so yours was the only mention of it I'd seen. When you published the last letter I wondered what happened. Glad to hear you plan to move.
So very excited for your novel, and looking forward to how you'll be expanding queer fiction and how we see ourselves. And very curious to see where you'll go, post-Substack. Have been planning out a newsletter and looking at Ghost, possibly!