Project MUSE®: Contemporary Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/261
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Contemporary Literature.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 45 (2004) through current issueLatest Articles: Contemporary LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Contemporary Literature1548-99490010-7484Latest articles in Contemporary Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®An Interview with Stephanie LaCava
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990380
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STEPHANIE LACAVAStephanie LaCava is the author of three novels: The Super-rationals (2020), I Fear My Pain Interests You (2022), and Nymph (2025). Stephanie LaCava is the author of three slim novels about art, love, and value—about the way humans find meaning in people and things, about the price they extract in return. Formerly a writer at Vogue, Stephanie LaCava writes “feel-bad” books.1 Based in New York, Stephanie LaCava is the editor and publisher of Small Press Books, which makes and sells limited edition books by celebrated artists such as Francis Picabia as well as the poems of Zoë Lund, an American poet, filmmaker, and fashion model best known as coscreenwriter of Bad Lieutenant (dir. Abel Ferrara, 1992).2
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/261/image/coversmallAn Interview with Stephanie LaCava2026-05-15text/htmlen-USAn Interview with Stephanie LaCava2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®619102026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15To See and Be Seen: Ethical Witnessing in Jon McGregor’s if nobody speaks of remarkable things
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990381
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Jon McGregor’s if nobody speaks of remarkable things has been criticized for privileging style over substance (Battersby). Yet such a reading risks overlooking the profound ethical and perceptual work embedded in its formal innovations. It is in the texture of the novel itself—from the rhythm of sentences to the architecture of the narrative—that the novel articulates what it means to inhabit a world attentively. In if nobody, McGregor shapes form and language into an argument of their own: that to read is inevitably to witness. The narrative unfolds from a single climactic moment, a center from which preceding and subsequent events radiate. Following the novel-in-a-day format, it takes the reader through the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/261/image/coversmallTo See and Be Seen: Ethical Witnessing in Jon McGregor’s if nobody speaks of remarkable things2026-05-15text/htmlen-USTo See and Be Seen: Ethical Witnessing in Jon McGregor’s if nobody speaks of remarkable things2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®653512026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15The Coloniality of Sodomy: Culeros, Erotic Sovereignty, and the Unraveling of Man in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990382
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Descubrí que los indígenas tenemos algo en común, a pesar de las barreras idiomáticas, las barreras étnicas, las diferencias de trajes. Que nuestra cultura es el maíz.1Héctor Tobar’s novel The Tattooed Soldier ends where Rigoberta Menchú’s testimonio begins: with the resurgence of maize as a testament to the survival of Indigenous ontologies in the face of genocide.2 The Nobel Laureate and Indigenous rights activist issues an implicit challenge to colonial orders by centering a sacred and reciprocal relationship between Indigenous peoples of the Americas and this nonhuman entity.3 In line with Menchú’s text, this article argues that the novel’s climactic vision—in which the Indigenous antagonist Guillermo Longoria
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/261/image/coversmallThe Coloniality of Sodomy: Culeros, Erotic Sovereignty, and the Unraveling of Man in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier2026-05-15text/htmlen-USThe Coloniality of Sodomy: Culeros, Erotic Sovereignty, and the Unraveling of Man in Héctor Tobar’s The Tattooed Soldier2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®937702026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Between Pleasure and Disturbance: May Swenson’s Queer Ecopoetics
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990383
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May Swenson’s Paris Review essay “Eclogue” maps how a body, receptive to the nonhuman world, encounters pleasure that produces an unsettling understanding of a person’s place within that world. The essay begins with Swenson’s speaker staring out of her apartment window and watching rain fall on a catalpa tree wedged between two buildings. Feeling pity for the rain that must fall on “brick and pavement,” she wonders if the tree feels pleasure or pain (48). This train of thought then extends to a meditation on how we “do not know Nature,” although “we think we are her cleverest child. Existing within her, a tiny part of her, we envision her mysterious outline, become afraid” (48). From the outset, Swenson foregrounds
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/261/image/coversmallBetween Pleasure and Disturbance: May Swenson’s Queer Ecopoetics2026-05-15text/htmlen-USBetween Pleasure and Disturbance: May Swenson’s Queer Ecopoetics2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®950432026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15Class, War, and Masculinity in Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/990384
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This essay treats Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk as distinctive among novels and films about Operation Iraqi Freedom in giving its readers as much an account of homeland economic upheavals as of a soldier’s combat experience. Billy Lynn details how neoliberalism’s logic of privatization, which amounts to the effort to bring public goods under the direction of the market, has also infiltrated institutions like the armed forces. Attending to the subjection of the military to laissez-faire dynamics, Fountain makes visible the threads binding the advent of the all-volunteer army in the early 1970s to the conditions that precipitated the Great Recession of 2008. Understanding Billy Lynn entails grasping
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/261/image/coversmallClass, War, and Masculinity in Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk2026-05-15text/htmlen-USClass, War, and Masculinity in Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk2026-05-152026TWOProject MUSE®915092026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002026-05-15