Since the dawn of book hauls on YouTube and its new successor, BookTok, many readers face great pressure to outpace their peers in books consumed. But does this unspoken competition actually drive literacy or foster a love of reading? Joseph O’Day doesn’t think so.
Read MoreIn a brief, yet indelible piece, Nancy Barnes explores the relationships seen and invisible that shift between people and their stuff. We are often defined by what we possess, but what becomes of our belongings when they breach the plain category of stuff and settle inside of us like heart and soul?
Read MoreLabeled as a “queer multimedia music zine”, this addition to Soundings showcases the interactions between the self, music, and expression. Ari Koontz takes us on a journey of identity and personality through the lens of a bespoke, rustic, album.
Read MoreRicardo Edwards is a Jamaican-born surrealist oil painter who deals in Black pride, beauty, and glamor. His works are steeped in Afro-Caribbean culture and aesthetic. But lurking beneath the bright tropical colors, an eerie sense crawls. Unhinged. Unflinching. and unyielding.
Read MoreThe life of Rafael Pinto, a Jewish apothecary addicted to his own wares in Sarajevo, is turned upside down with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the event that sparked World War I. Pinto is conscripted, and while in reluctant service as a medic, he meets Osman, a fellow soldier and a Muslim, whose smile and stories charm everyone he meets, including Pinto.
Read MoreIn just 250 pages, Other Names for Love is at once an intimate coming-of-age story, a family saga, and a social novel, capturing the tense, sometimes tragic, interplay of personal desires, familial duties, and social transformation.
Read MoreLong before we realize Luca and Alberto can't swim at the beach, we are half-shown the sleek length of the first creature, the sparkle of the lanterns on the scales as it arcs over the skiff. We claimed all the fish movies ages before the fisherman with his harpoon had time to stammer, What a monster! Horrifying! The gramophone sinks to the seafloor and becomes ours, along with every other treasure. Ariel, longing for legs, longing for her voice. Ursula glammed up in Divine's makeup. Protect the children, they screech, driving us to the cave with their tridents or scribbling over our outlines with (frankly bodacious) tentacles. The more the merrier when it comes to appendages.
Read MoreMICHAEL POGACH (he/him) is the author of the award-nominated Rafael Ward series: The Spider in the Laurel (2018 Kindle Book Award finalist), The Long Oblivion (2019 Kindle Book Award semi-finalist), The Tyrant Gods, and The Hidden Empire, as well as the chapbook Zero to Sixty. I (Abigail Michelini, Poetry Editor at ORP) had the privilege of speaking with Michael in September 2022 about his newest book, Slip. In the interview below, Michael shares with us his process of finding his way through the “swamp of writing” and the ways in which his characters both reflect his life and surprise him with their demands.
Read MoreChallenging norms and convention feel like an instinct for our millennium generation. Amy Tan (1952 — ) tells heartfelt stories in the first person point of view of four pairs of Chinese mothers and Chinese American daughters during and after WWII in China and the US, investigating the value of family legacy and memories within the scope of an era's history.
Read MoreWayne Miller doesn’t hesitate to probe our insecurities and hopes, but more precisely our assumptions about what we think we understand about our present America in his new book of poetry published by Milkweed Press, We the Jury.
Read MoreKirschner’s work forces us to struggle on multiple levels—with the sentences, with the stories, with our own expectations. I felt like Jacob wrestling the angel by the end of it—bruised and blessed.
Read MoreThe seam between devastation and wit runs through Parks-Ramage’s whole novel. It is the art of blurring the traumatic and the trivial that is at the heart of sophistication, the native aesthetic of many gay communities, including the cadre of New York City queens who populate the novel’s pages.
Read MoreGhost in a Black Girl’s Throat is a voice, long throttled, summoning ancestors for strength, for guidance, and for language to enable a radical articulation of self in a place of historical trauma.
Read MoreThe Boys and the Nuns follows a coterie of Boystown gays (and one adamant lesbian) and the unlikely group of nuns who befriend and defend them as Chicago considers passing the Human Rights Ordinance in the late 1980s.
Read MoreThe film is not a coming-out story, though there is a moment of revelation. Nor is it a romance, despite a pair of tender scenes. It is primarily a study of toxic masculinity and the cost of surviving it.
Read MoreJUBI ARRIOLA-HEADLEY (he/him or they/them) is a Black queer poet, storyteller, & first-generation United Statesian. We are honored to present a selection from his first book length collection of poems, Original Kink.
Read MoreOn the first night we sleep together you cup my face in your hands and say, “I see you. I really see you” and I know you’re talking about my gender and I believe you so deeply my body shakes…
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