Unreal City: a cartoon megalopolis where towers are built of cotton candy, facts scatter like pixie dust, and the truth is whatever you feel it to be. And it's no fantasy. It's where we live. "We dwell in Unreal City. We believe in un-being." With saber-like wit, poet and professor Anthony Esolen leads readers on a tour through the ruins of their own Western world—through king-size bookstores, manicured college campuses, strobe-lit choir lofts, mechanized farms, divorce courts, drag-queen libraries, and beyond. This hilarious guide to a culture gone mad with sex and self-care minces no words and spares no egos. We the people of Unreal City are no better, and certainly no smarter, than our fathers. But fear not. Sex and the Unreal City insists there's no need to settle down in the ninth circle of unreality. Esolen lights a torch and heads up the well-trod path back to our cleaner, kinder, truer homeland: Earth. Along the way, the author sings the songs of masters long forgotten—Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, the Evangelists—and asks us to join in.
Unreal City contains five highly charged stories about relationships: “Echoes into Eternity,” “Evelyn Dalton-Hoyt,” “Emordana,” “The Yellowknife Retrospective,” and “Objet d’Art.” The stories address gender, narcissism, marriage, subjectivity, objectification, and the thin line that divides love from hate. Bryant’s characters sometimes feel like they are navigating their way through the darkness in an attempt to make sense of love, sex, art, and life. Existential and elliptical, the stories play beautifully against Bryant’s precise and fully-realized artwork, which echoes such masters as Jaime Hernandez and Daniel Clowes. In Unreal City, characters cannot walk into a room without their world turning inside out. Readers will be similarly upended by the discovery of this major new talent.
CONTENT Editorial by Rev. Gavan Jennings In Passing: Roads taken and roads not taken by Michael Kirke Lenten Listening by Rev. Donncha Ó hAodha Two Papal Visits by Tim O’Sullivan BOOKS Because of Our Fathers review by Pat Hanratty Prison Journal review by Tim O’Sullivan The Fire of Joy review by Francis Phillips Religion’s Sudden Decline review by James Bradshaw Sex and the Unreal City review by Rev. Gavan Jennings
Unreal City: a cartoon megalopolis where towers are built of cotton candy, facts scatter like pixie dust, and the truth is whatever you feel it to be. And it's no fantasy. It's where we live. "We dwell in Unreal City. We believe in un-being." With saber-like wit, poet and professor Anthony Esolen leads readers on a tour through the ruins of their own Western world—through king-size bookstores, manicured college campuses, strobe-lit choir lofts, mechanized farms, divorce courts, drag-queen libraries, and beyond. This hilarious guide to a culture gone mad with sex and self-care minces no words and spares no egos. We the people of Unreal City are no better, and certainly no smarter, than our fathers. But fear not. Sex and the Unreal City insists there's no need to settle down in the ninth circle of unreality. Esolen lights a torch and heads up the well-trod path back to our cleaner, kinder, truer homeland: Earth. Along the way, the author sings the songs of masters long forgotten—Shakespeare, Dante, Milton, the Evangelists—and asks us to join in.
"An achingly rendered exploration of queer desire, grief, and the inexorable scars of the past." —Katy Rose Pool, author of There Will Come A Darkness Death lurks around every corner in this unforgettable Jewish historical fantasy about a city, a boy, and the shadows of the past that bind them both together. Chicago, 1893. For Alter Rosen, this is the land of opportunity, and he dreams of the day he’ll have enough money to bring his mother and sisters to America, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania. But when Alter’s best friend, Yakov, becomes the latest victim in a long line of murdered Jewish boys, his dream begins to slip away. While the rest of the city is busy celebrating the World’s Fair, Alter is now living a nightmare: possessed by Yakov’s dybbuk, he is plunged into a world of corruption and deceit, and thrown back into the arms of a dangerous boy from his past. A boy who means more to Alter than anyone knows. Now, with only days to spare until the dybbuk takes over Alter’s body completely, the two boys must race to track down the killer—before the killer claims them next. "Chillingly sinister, warmly familiar, and breathtakingly transportive, The City Beautiful is the haunting, queer Jewish historical thriller of my darkest dreams."—Dahlia Adler, creator of LGBTQreads and editor of That Way Madness Lies A New York Public Library Best Book for Teens 2021
From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to re-arranging gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a position of central importance in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.
A poetic debut novel, formally experimental, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny and brutally real. Nochita is tender, fierce, and unforgettable. Daughter to a divorced new age guru, Nochita wanders through the cracks of California's counter-culture, half feral child, half absurdist prophet. When tragedy strikes she is sent to live with her father, a working-class cowboy with a fragile grasp on sobriety and a dangerously mean fiancée. Stuck with adults chillingly unable to care for her, Nochita takes to the streets, a runaway with nothing to run from, driven forward by desperation, hope, and an irrepressible wonder. Nochita is a poetic novel dazzling in its detail, stylistically daring, by turns hallucinatory, darkly funny, and brutally real. At its heart is the singular voice of Nochita, tender and fierce, alone and alive and utterly unforgettable. Praise for Nochita: "Nochita shimmers with humor and delight, she burns with stark raving intelligence."—Mary Gaitskill "In Nochita, Dia Felix builds an extraordinarily rich and inventive language to carry the kaleidoscopic point of view of her young protagonist. What a pleasure to open a book and find such exuberant and committed artistry. A stunning debut."—Janet Fitch "There is a way some writers say hello on the first page that gets me excited to be in their conversation. Nochita has it with teeth!! I love this book and the weird strong eye it has on the world, melting clothes off bodies with a crème brulée torch. Nochita is quite the dance to read through, kind of like shaking a bad morning off and realizing you really love this world. Makes me smile, like Dia Felix writes, 'I think I can latch on to this machine now.' BUY THIS BOOK, don’t just stand there reading my fucking blurb!!"— CAConrad "In the vein of extra-sensitive displaced daughters à la White Oleander, with the crystallized hyper-perception at the center of The Bluest Eye, Nochita is singular, resonant—her pictures get under your skin and stay there; more than lines embedded, here are things you've seen before, numbed and fallen away with the process of becoming adult. Against writers who make a phalanx of accuracy and precision, Felix delivers synesthetic gut-sense in a visual pile-on that picks up and turns over your sense of being human, dirt and M&Ms and kundalini shakti, written by a gifted seer whose inner child is alive and screaming … Nochita brings it down to the roots."—Mila Jaroniec
"City of Mirrors is deftly written and smart. On top of that, it is entertaining as hell."?Michael Connelly Running out of money, Diana Poole is forced to go back to the only work she knows: acting. Her much-loved husband and movie-star mother have died, and now Diana is over thirty-five. In Hollywood that means she might as well be dead. Still, a few key people remember her talent, and she lands a role in a new movie. But an actress should never get her hopes up, especially when she discovers the female lead’s murdered body. Raised in her mother’s shadow, Diana knows people in “the business”will go to dangerous lengths to protect their images. When her own life and career are threatened, Diana decides to fight back and find the killer. But unmasking the surprising murderer isn’t that easy, especially when she uncovers what’s real?and unreal?in her own life.
