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Photo by Michael O. Snyder

Fresh Storylines

“The Queens of Queen City” is photographer Michael Snyder's immersive photodocumentary, nearly a decade in the making, of the drag community of Cumberland, Maryland, in northern Appalachia. Just a few images into it, I was struck by what its premise asked of me, because, by engaging with it and being honest about the surprise that drew me in, I had to confront a reflexive bias: How can drag culture thrive in such a deeply conservative part of the country? This paradox gives the project its magnetic pull, but the dissonance is illusory, and purposefully so, as it mirrors Snyder’s own edification about the region where he grew up. Of course queer communities have claimed space in Appalachia. That’s because it is far more complex and nuanced than we tend to give it credit for being.

<em>Black Leopard, Red Wolf</em>. By Marlon James. Penguin, 2019. 640p. HB, $30.</p>

An Outside Man

When Marlon James announced his follow-up to his Booker-Prize winning novel, A Brief History of Seven Killings, it was met with intense excitement. James is best known as a literary novelist with a reputation for not mincing his words in public. In promotion for his last book, James sparked debate with his comments about the domination of white women as gatekeepers in publishing and his critique on the distinction between white people who identify as nonracist as opposed to antiracist. In the business of literary fiction, writers who speak so directly and bluntly about how power in the industry works are rare and often marginalized. But the honor of the Booker Prize, one of the top prizes in the world, seemed to usher James into the world of publishing respectability.


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Forward Thinking

Claire Schwartz: According to the poet Marie Howe, who studied with Joseph Brodsky at Columbia, Brodsky said: “You Americans are so naïve. You think evil is going to come into your houses wearing big black boots. It doesn’t come like that. Look at the language. It begins in the language.” You’ve written about the relationship between language and the social imagination—in particular, about the ways that totalitarian regimes in Russia and, more recently, the current government in the United States, have eroded public speech. Would you describe what you mean by that and how you see language functioning in public space right now?

Masha Gessen: For totalitarian regimes, language is an instrument of subjugation. It’s a way of controlling both behavior and thought. Attempting to ensure that words mean what the regime says they mean is a way of undermining people’s ability to inhabit a shared reality outside of what the regime says reality is. There are all sorts of tricks the regime performs along the way—such as using a word to mean its opposite, or almost its opposite. 

<i>Calling a Wolf a Wolf</i>. By Kaveh Akbar. Alice James, 2017. 100p. PB, $16.95.

Toward a New Masculinity

If you are hungry for complicated layers of displacement spiked with an uneasiness of any sort of assimilation, as I am, Alex Dimitrov’s poetry might feel like just the right home for your homelessness. Bulgaria-born and Detroit-raised, Dimitrov [...]