culture Summer 2023

A Loss for Words

AMONG THE OLDEST REFERENCES to menstruation in literature is in the book of Genesis, in a story about a lie. Rachel stole her father’s household gods, it goes, and when he came to retrieve them, she threw a covering over the objects and sat on it. She couldn’t stand, she apologized to her father, because she was in “the way of women.” At the end of the sixteenth century, an English clergyman clarified in his guide to Genesis that Rachel wasn’t pretending to be incapable of standing, just uncomfortable, due to her “monethly custome,” an ancestor to our contemporary “period.” As Jenni Nuttall

fiction Mar/Apr/May 2021

It’s Complicated

TORREY PETERS HAS BEEN self-publishing and giving away her stories online for pay-what-you-like prices since the mid-2010s. In the short works The Masker, Glamour Boutique, and Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones—a sci-fi contagion story about hormones—Peters zeroes in on moments when her trans protagonist behaves or thinks in ways that communal consensus has agreed is “wrong.” Peters simplifies nothing, explains nothing to the outsider, which is why she is treasured by readers who are also protective of her and her work. For as long as such stories have stayed in the underground, where people

culture Dec/Jan 2020

Bleak House

There are a handful of novels in the English literary canon that directly concern domestic abuse. Most of them are light on direct testimony from victims, instead sublimating the violence of the marriage plot into the heroine’s surroundings. In classics like Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, or Rebecca, the reader will notice something wrong with the house long before they see the flaws in the lover.

It makes perfect sense to dramatize the marital home in a novel about intimate torture, because that is where the wife is trapped. Then as now, a spouse who wants to control

culture Apr/May 2017

Fighting Words

The cover of Sarah Schulman's new book shows a pretty sunset. Its title hovers in white letters over pink and blue clouds like a benign choir of aircraft. Schulman clearly intends to parachute her book into the debate over how people should respond to and resolve conflict. She is the author of ten novels, many plays (produced and unproduced), and five previous works of nonfiction, including influential, often combative books like The Gentrification of the Mind: Witness to a Lost Imagination (2012), Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences (2009), and Israel/Palestine and the

Jo Livingstone