Author: M Téllez
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Monk Reviews the Amphitheater of the Dead by Guy Hocquenghem
Translated by Max Fox About a year or two ago I cooked up a string of words to function as promotional slogan for my work, particularly for my business card and table signage at zine & book fairs: “sci-fi magic smut survivor memoir.” AMPHITHEATER OF THE DEAD is a scifi survivor memoir. It’s set in…
FILE: reviews
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Monk Reviews Portland Diary by Jamie Berrout
The promotional description of this book is good and apt. Portland Diary is a collection of short stories about women faced with impossible situations. Each of the seven narratives unfolds its heightened, speculative version of the impossible everyday reality we find outselves in as racialized people, queer and colonial and mentally ill subjects, enemies or…
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Monk Reviews Doc and Fluff by Patrick Califia
My copy of this book has a foreword from the author more or less calling critics out over the violence in the book, chiding them to basically get real. I realize many people out there don’t bother to read the forewords or introductions to books, but I’m not one of them and reading that on…
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Monk Reviews Dhalgren by Samuel R. Delany
For years I’ve been told that DHALGREN is an experimental novel, that it’s maybe not the best first book to read by Delany, that lots of people start it but few finish it. I started reading it like seven years ago and then got bored and put it down. Then a friend said they were…
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Monk Reviews Future Pleasures edited by Rin Kim
Germantown artist and event planner Malachi Lily was one of the first to submit their incredible squish-slime smut myth The Violet Island during the open call for Venus Saturn Square, and it was through them that I learned of Other Publishing and their QPOC scifi fantasy smut anthology, FUTURE PLEASURES. They had what looked like…
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Monk Reviews Bitch Goddess edited by Patrick Califia and Drew Campbell
The spiritual path of the dominant woman This review was first posted on goodreads in 2016: On a personal level, this book struck me as a relic of what I’ll casually call the (lgbt) BDSM scene of the 90s. Being able to effortlessly order it at my convenience and days later read the collection in…
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Monk Reviews The Leather Daddy and The Femme by Carol Queen
I ordered this book alongside DOING IT FOR DADDY. I read that one first and when I got to Carol Queen’s contribution in the anthology and it was a chapter from this book, I jumped immediately over to read Queen’s entire book from there. THE LEATHER DADDY AND THE FEMME is so good and hot…
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Monk Reviews Doing It For Daddy edited by Patrick Califia
“Read me a story, Daddy.”Oh, I think I can manage that … just take your pick. In between these covers you will be able to find just about any kind of daddy your heart desires. There’s a biological father whose gay son shows him that there’s more to sex than procreation; a leather daddy who…
FILE: reviews
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Trans Times in the Broad Street Review
The city is changing: new faces, apartments, businesses. These changes are often framed as progress or advancement. But what about what’s left behind? What happens to those who can’t afford the tickets to the future? In the COVID era, remote lifestyles radically alter the flow of life in Philadelphia. The past is being pushed out…
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Monk Reviews Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree Jr
A brutal meditation in a hefty short story collection. Tiptree wrote dark and fatalistic sci-fi that lingers on today as something of a passed over and forgotten writer of the 70s speculative and feminist sci-fi waves (well this book is still in print so it’s not that forgotten). At one point Tiptree was lauded as…
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Monk Reviews James Tiptree Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
To grow up as a “girl” is to be nearly fatally spoiled, deformed, confused, and terrified; to be responded to with falsities, to be reacted to as nothing or as a thing—and nearly to become that thing. Alice Sheldon I got into this biography after reading Tiptree’s Her Smoke Rose Up Forever. Anymore I recommend…
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Monk Reviews Testojunkie by Paul Preciado
Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era A group of us were sitting upstairs at Tattooed Mom’s after a reading I opened at the Wooden Shoe, when one of the attendees and friend of the headliner recommended me this book, suggesting I would find a lot to like about it. Me, a trans nonbinary…
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