Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators
Reading Prescribee is not dissimilar to the experience of coming across a recipe in a vintage American cookbook: it transforms the familiar ingredients of contemporary life into an uncanny, discomfiting concoction. Wielding English as a foreign language and medium, Chang redefines the history of Taiwan and captures the alienation of immigrant experience with a startlingly original voice. Flouting tired expectations of race, gender, nationality, and citizen status, Prescribee is as provocative as it is perceptive, as playful as it is sobering.
We Are All Together by Richard Fulco
It’s 1967, the Summer of Love. When twenty-one-year-old guitarist Stephen Cane’s promising band falls apart, he is forced to move back home with his Christian mother. Unwilling to give up on his rock and roll dreams, he flees to New York to patch things up with his former friend and bandmate, Dylan John, a rising pioneer of psychedelic rock whose band is on the verge of making it big. When Dylan unexpectedly quits Red Afternoon to be a civil rights activist, Stephen is handed the opportunity of a lifetime.
Lured into the trappings and pitfalls of celebrity and confronted with a dangerous secret, Stephen spirals into self-doubt and misplaced loyalties. Against the backdrop of a nation in turmoil, he questions his dreams, his parents’ loyalties to a bygone era, his inability to choose wisely in love, and his racial bias. We Are All Together addresses a nation struggling with its mythological past and the effects it has had on the integrity of the individual. Does the artist owe the world anything? Does the ailing world need another rock star?
“Erev” meaning “Evening” or “The eve of” in Hebrew and “Gildene” meaning “Golden” in Yiddish, Adrienne Novy’s collection shines lights on the many facets of sexuality, heartbreak, body image, shame, and what it means to be Jewish but not feel Jewish enough. From Timothée Chalamet to Harry Styles and beyond, Novy uses music and pop culture as a coping mechanism for mental health recovery, the rise and fall of a first relationship, and the ways chronic illness and pain have been left out of the bedroom and sex education. Erev Gildene is both the examination of the mirror, the necklace you forgot to remove before the shower, and the gold it all leaves in its wake.
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