Fire in the Belly

In your new book, Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987‑1993 you write that you can’t tell the story of ACT UP chronologically because too much was happening at once. So, you arranged the book thematically. What did this allow you to do that you wouldn’t otherwise?

It lets the reader experience what time was like inside the organization. It was so intense. So many people were suffering and so many people were acting. In the back of the book, I do give a timeline so if people want to see when a particular event happened, they can, but it would be impossible to write

culture Apr/May 2017

Monster Love

Kate Zambreno's first novel, O Fallen Angel, published in 2010 and just reissued by Harper Perennial, takes place somewhere between Middle America and hell, if hell, as Jean-Paul Sartre famously indicated in No Exit, is other people. There certainly seems to be no exit in O Fallen Angel, set in the suburban Midwest in a "Dreamhouse in the country far far away from all the scary city people alright let's just say it in a whisper the scary (black) people they keep on coming closer and closer we keep on moving farther and farther away." Mommy, an archetypal suffocating mother, stays inside and