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Rebecca Liu
Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

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There are only girls on the internet

Book Review

August 2022

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2022

I remember the first time I saw it, like a freshly alert hare alarmed by movement in the distant grasslands. It was 2013. Model...

Book Review

September 2020

Pankaj Mishra’s ‘Bland Fanatics’

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

September 2020

The Anglo-American commentariat is full of lofty egos. Pankaj Mishra has developed a reputation as their great deflater. ‘Watch...

Garth Greenwell’s debut novel What Belongs to You has won praise on both sides of the Atlantic Edmund White describes ‘American literature [as] richer by one masterpiece’; Damon Galgut praises the beauty of Greenwell’s language, while James Wood writes, ‘In an age of the sentence fetish, Greenwell thinks and writes, as Woolf or Sebald do, in larger units of comprehension’   Greenwell’s writing celebrates queer spaces and behaviours His short story ‘Gospodar’, published in The Unprofessionals: New American Writing from the Paris Review, describes a hook-up that turns violent – the threat of violence is ever-present in his work, and so too is shame The story’s protagonist struggles between a desire for sexual debasement and the requirement that his denigration be consensual Here, as in the novel, shame and desire are bedfellows   What Belongs to You was published following the passage of equal marriage legislation in the UK and US Greenwell has spoken eloquently about the significance of marriage being available as a way of life for all people, regardless of sexual orientation However, he, like many queer activists, has expressed concern about a creeping homonormativity, and the erasure of different, queer models of living It remains unclear what the novel’s narrator and Mitko, the Bulgarian hustler at its heart, truly want or need from each other Their relationship remains transactional However, there is also a sense that hooks-ups, cruising spots – queer spaces – provide moments of fleeting intimacy unavailable to those confined to the norms of straight society Just as the novel describes the lasting damage done to queer people by their difference, by the withholding of ‘a measure of the world’s beneficence’ that straight people take for granted, it appeals for tolerance, for grace, for those struggling in the face of systemic rejection The conflicting demands of a desire to simply be, uninhibited, and for acceptance manifests itself in a desire that is, in some sense, strange and unknown even to its subject His novel holds these conflicting forces in balance   Yet the novel remains defiantly queer, with a moral undertone that castigates the failings of those parts of the

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Contributor

August 2019

Rebecca Liu is a commissioning editor at Guardian Saturday and a staff writer at Another Gaze.

Jia Tolentino’s ‘Trick Mirror’

Book Review

August 2019

Rebecca Liu

Book Review

August 2019

Talk about the fates of young professional women today and you will often alight on two themes: the anxieties that come with living in...

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fiction

June 2013

What We Did After We Lost 100 Years' Wealth in 24 Months

Agri Ismaïl

fiction

June 2013

‘World finance had, in 2008, a near-death experience.’   The words belong to a partner of a renowned international...

fiction

July 2014

Zone

Mathias Enard

TR. Charlotte Mandell

fiction

July 2014

I remember the day Andrija the invincible collapsed for the first time, the warrior of warriors whom we’d never...

fiction

Issue No. 17

Harmless Like You

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

fiction

Issue No. 17

Interstate 95, September 2016   Celeste sat on the front seat wearing her black turtleneck sweater. She had three...

 

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