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FIONA ALISON DUNCAN
FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary Prize for Bisexual Fiction.

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Interview with Fanny Howe

Interview

Issue No. 29

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

Issue No. 29

Fanny Howe’s bibliography is as bewildering as her itinerant biography. Born in 1940 in Buffalo, New York, the poet and author grew up in...

Interview

January 2020

Interview with Jamieson Webster

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Interview

January 2020

Jamieson Webster serves as a torchbearer for a field out of popular favour. Her practice, psychoanalysis, was last century’s...

To read Shola von Reinhold’s ornate, multi-layered novel LOTE (2020) is to encounter a baroque mind It tells the story of a queer Black thinker named Mathilda, in the present day, who is transfixed by an historical era that does not adequately represent her Via diaries, letters and photographs she discovers the Bright Young Things, as they were fondly known, a set of decadent and disobedient socialites who threw elaborate, drug-fuelled parties across the 1920s and 30s Through a cocktail of hedonism, androgyny and queer love, this group — along with their counterparts in the Bloomsbury Group — began to deconstruct patriarchy a century ago, and seem to offer Mathilda an escape from the present, with all its social and racial barriers – except they don’t The catch is that members of both groups were, by and large, spoilt, white and rich Despite their experimental poetry, queer lifestyles, and self-fashioning (‘frock consciousness’, as Virginia Woolf called it), radicality is countered by entitlement; after all, rich people have always made exceptions of their own kind     The novel is underpinned by a question: Why are so few queer Black British modernists documented in those flourishing interwar years? Through an impressive mix of scholarship and historical fiction, Reinhold sets out to unravel and challenge this history, prying open the ledgers to ask how and why the received archive is so overwhelmingly white ‘I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman,’ Woolf famously wrote ‘And/or Black,’ amends Reinhold – and with this as a sort of epigraph, their novel begins both a critique and a celebration of the era, setting out to recover the lives of Black Anons, and to conjure voices that didn’t make it into history   The novel opens in the National Portrait Gallery archive in London, circa 2019 Mathilda has been recruited, without pay, to sift through a

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Contributor

June 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN is a Canadian-American author and artist. Her debut novel Exquisite Mariposa won the 2020 LAMBDA Literary...

Exquisite Mariposa

Fiction

July 2019

FIONA ALISON DUNCAN

Fiction

July 2019

I broke three contracts in 2016. The first was verbal, a monogamy clause. But he was fucking around too, and I knew, because everybody...

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feature

Issue No. 19

Editorial

The Editors

feature

Issue No. 19

‘A crisis becomes a crisis when the white male body is affected,’ writes the philosopher Rosi Braidotti, interviewed in...

feature

October 2015

War is Easy, Peace is Hard

Alexander Christie-Miller

feature

October 2015

At around midday on 19 July, Koray Türkay boarded a bus in Istanbul and set off for the Syrian...

poetry

September 2016

Two Poems

Daisy Lafarge

poetry

September 2016

siphoning   habitual catalogue of the day, intro ft. blossom fallen from a gated property and crisping on the...

 

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