politics Apr/May 2019

Psycho Analysis

“I never pretended to be an expert on millennials,” writes Bret Easton Ellis halfway through White, and the reader desperately wishes this were true. Ellis is best known for American Psycho, the controversial 1991 cult novel about an image-obsessed Wall Street serial killer; the film adaption would star Christian Bale as psychotic investment banker Patrick Bateman. Following several increasingly metafictional novels and a few bad screenplays, White is Ellis’s first foray into nonfiction, and the result is less a series of glorified, padded-out blog posts than a series of regular, normal-size

fiction Sept/Oct/Nov 2018

Prep School Confidential

Ziggy Klein has no boobs. The only thing her chest knows how to grow is anxiety. Fifteen years old, Jewish, and hesitant, with an interior life like a hoarder’s apartment, Ziggy has just transferred to Kandara, an all-girls preparatory school in the glossy Sydney suburbs, where she promptly begins studying the dense hierarchical ecology. At the top are the Cates, old-money girls with hyphenated surnames and pearlescent Instagrams. At the bottom are the ugly, the suspected lesbians, and, Ziggy assumes, herself.

Before long, she has fallen in with the feminists. They indoctrinate her immediately.

print Summer 2018

A Phantasmic Woman

ONE LEARNS very quickly that Myra Breckinridge is an unreliable narrator. Her writerly voice—for we are reading her diary entries, composed for the benefit of her psychoanalyst—is foxy, cerebral, with the bombast of an unpublished academic, as well as a nearly cosmic narcissism into whose delusional gravity you cannot (and by you I mean me, which could be a slogan for narcissism) help but be sucked. Myra’s a liar. This is redundant, because Myra is a transsexual, and in the medical literature the transsexual is, invariably, a deceiver. None is more famous in this regard than the woman known to

Andrea Long Chu