Hal Schrieve (Author of Out of Salem)

Hal Schrieve rated a book it was amazing The Gastronomical Me by M.F.K. Fisher	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me–queerness, class, violence, sensuality, and lyricism MFK Fisher is one of a few complicated midcentury American women writers whose grip on me is functionally bottomless despite my distaste for her bourgeois class all ...more
Jun 06, 2026 09:22AM · 4 likes · like · see review
Hal Schrieve and 4 other people liked Sam's review of Wrath Goddess Sing: "As a big fan of linguistic nerd stuff & greek myth reimaginings instead of pure retellings & women driven mad and vengeful this was so much better than I expected. The story takes a while to get going and I bounced off it once in the past due to that" Read more of this review »
May 11, 2026 04:26AM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book it was amazing Worthy of the Event: An Essay by Vivian Blaxell	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
May 10, 2026 02:31PM · 3 likes · like · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book liked it Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation by Sophie Lewis	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I think the broad concept of this book is exceptionally useful as a framework, it is very readable and entertaining, and i solidly agree with lewis’s stated positive politics of antiracism, trans solidarity, and proletarian feminism. I also will say ...more
May 08, 2026 02:28PM · 2 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve and 4 other people liked Sage's review of Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation: "More like a 3.5, since I enjoyed it so much. A majority of the information included in this takedown of "enemy feminisms" is great, and I learned a lot, especially about feminist movements across the pond. I had a lot of fun reading it and agreed wit" Read more of this review »
May 08, 2026 02:26PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve and 5 other people liked zoë's review of Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation: "I'll start with this caveat: I began this book expecting something very different from the end result. Lewis's work is exceptionally researched and provides important information for anyone trying to understand our post-feminist hellscape and how we " Read more of this review »
May 08, 2026 02:25PM · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book liked it Eden II by Kenny Wroten	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
This is one of those books that shoots itself in the foot by being fantastically ambitious-- more ambitious than the publisher wants, more ambitious than the editor presumably knows what to do with. My reaction to it, mixed as it is, is the reaction ...more
Apr 12, 2026 05:50PM · 3 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Eden II by Kenny Wroten. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Eden II by Kenny Wroten <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire by Wayne Koestenbaum	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I requested Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, because I read about twenty pages of it while staying at my friend Hanu’s house; I did that both because Ben Miller from Bad Gays podcast recommends ...more
Mar 12, 2026 08:00AM · 4 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Queen's Throat by Wayne Koestenbaum. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Queen's Throat by Wayne Koestenbaum <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema by Thomas Waugh	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I like this essay collection. I acquired it--I think via my?? therapist?? when I was a teenager, and I didn't get a lot out of it initially beyond watching Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and the 1992 Swoon. There's far more in here than I remembered, and mo ...more
Mar 02, 2026 11:49AM · 2 likes · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of The Fruit Machine by Thomas Waugh. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — The Fruit Machine by Thomas Waugh <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows by Megan Milks (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The clever nameplay title marks Milks' delve into the realm of journalism-meets-personal-essay, which is kind of the genre that they're meant for outside weird fiction. They are concerned with the world, with power, and with transmutation and empathy ...more
Feb 26, 2026 10:17AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Mega Milk by Megan Milks. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Mega Milk by Megan Milks <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Hal Schrieve rated a book it was amazing

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

MFK Fisher’s The Gastronomical Me–queerness, class, violence, sensuality, and lyricism

MFK Fisher is one of a few complicated midcentury American women writers whose grip on me is functionally bottomless despite my distaste for her bourgeois class all ...more

Hal Schrieve and 4 other people liked Sam's review of Wrath Goddess Sing:

"As a big fan of linguistic nerd stuff & greek myth reimaginings instead of pure retellings & women driven mad and vengeful this was so much better than I expected. The story takes a while to get going and I bounced off it once in the past due to that" Read more of this review »

Hal Schrieve rated a book it was amazing

Worthy of the Event: An Essay
by Vivian Blaxell

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Hal Schrieve rated a book liked it

Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation
by Sophie Lewis

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

I think the broad concept of this book is exceptionally useful as a framework, it is very readable and entertaining, and i solidly agree with lewis’s stated positive politics of antiracism, trans solidarity, and proletarian feminism. I also will say I think the broad concept of this book is exceptionally useful as a framework, it is very readable and entertaining, and i solidly agree with lewis’s stated positive politics of antiracism, trans solidarity, and proletarian feminism. I also will say this book is very readable: it's essays about totally hateable people written by an eloquent hater. I tore through it. That said, despite this containing a lot of really fun to read essays and some solid research— particularly in threading together a connection between various imperial nineteenth century white suffragists and the policing/fascist aspirations of the 1920s-1940s-- i think the whole text taken together is a little more scattershot than it should be and relies on a bunch of solid critiques of some questionably chosen representatives to make its case. The main thing is-- these women are enormously variably powerful/evil. The suffragette into cops and fascists stuff is pretty central to understanding western/white feminism's relationship to states, but I kept puzzling over why she doesn't scoot forward in time and take a look at current cop/fash feminists from Dick to Lightfoot to Harris. The eccentric white tourist and congolese genocide denial artist prefigures current genocide denialists neatly-- but I feel curious about why we aren't talking about the relationship between Congolese genocide denial, Holocaust genocide denial, Palestinian genocide denial and American indigenous genocide denial and the feminine wing of imperial expansion here at home. I think rather it might be more valuable to spend time threading together a coherent material argument for *why* these enemy feminisms arose, why they articulated themselves as feminisms, what audience they had, or how gained the currency they did. Some of that “why/how” is clearer after reading: the connection between 1970s feminists and modern TERFs is a 1–>2 connection, as is the anti abolitionist nationalist feminist into the cop, fascist and pornophobe.

But some things which are genuinely difficult to tease out from history’s details are left a little dim and fuzzy, and I do not think Lewis does her project favors by acting as if certain questions are clearly historically settled without exploring circumstances further. To give evidence that sex work must be a feminist cause, it is useful to contrast real time past and current worker struggles toward health care, housing safety and the right to a family with the worker-erasing voices of pornophobes which imagine and flatten worker experience in order to erase the violence of the “savior” feminist or jail— which Lewis really does not do. She does not take seriously the most solid arguments that her opponents have— that porn/sex work/coerced abortion can hurt women (and others), which like other work, art/propaganda, and medical abuse, it *can*— and she does not provide the alternate answer for a feminist solution in cases where this happens (which is: worker solidarity, media criticism, education, human respect, community justice against violence, and free healthcare saves more than jail or punishment or denigration: it is not just cooler, it works better). Changing types of print matter, digital matter, working conditions and relations with bosses/companies also materially affect the struggle of the working actor/artist and the conditions she lives within, and i would have liked some acknowledgement that it is not as easy as saying “some porn is feminist”. It is if you can make it in a cooperative and distribute it in a way that workers get profits! But the failures of liberated third wave porn strategies and the abuses of the digital landscape do continue and they persuade some workers some of the time that feminism’s promises are hollow. To respond, you have to be in touch, speaking to those struggles.

In order to discuss the racism of white suffragists, it would be useful to quote Black feminist historians about the circumstances that their peers were living through and how Black women were organizing then, or to examine the legal situation Black women/colonized women of the same period were in. Ideally, to do so at length—rather than discuss Truth’s life and white misreadings of it (important!) and call it a day. This would demonstrate that white allyship is actually possible. This is imperative to examining the hypocrisy of white imperial feminists, who made extensive use of their control over other’s bodies, education, children and work. We skip over women’s place in residential schools, african and asian missions, early eugenic healthcare which sterilized women against their will. We really skip the Soviet Union, socialist/anarchist/communist feminisms and their sometimes radical, sometimes judgemental and elitist arguments about marriage and the family. We skip the development of feminist rhetoric within political parties within the west in response to feminist pressure, and women in trade unions either in the US/Britain/Europe as a whole, we skip the incremental feminism of liberal democracy and academia that becomes inaccessible as soon as it is born because of the end of free college in america …. so the book, even as it mocks girlboss feminism, cannot really help a lay reader imagine its alternative and the points of pressure and historical contingency that produced it. Lewis seems to assume you already know about that— but that knowledge is what provides the counterargument to the enemy, rather than the enemy’s absurd statements or their love of uniforms or the state. It is the experience of the oppressed who provide evidence of the right platforms and actions to take; it is harder to read it from a negative. And it is simultaneously true that workers themselves are not always virtuous and full of solidarity, as the violent conflict between cis sex workers and the transfeminine mollies of the 18th century in london make clear— and Lewis really leaves out the working class racism of the American south, or the self-interested nationalism of the US leftist today who cannot recognize that a welfare state for them would depend on extraction from the global south unless they fight alongside workers from around the world.

I think in the chapter on transness, what is reaaaallly needed here is an acknowledgement of “enemy transness” alongside enemy feminisms. The transphobic radical feminist, as she existed in the 1970s-80s, was responding to a perception that trans people worship doctors and institutions of power. It is true that generally we do not; it is also true that there are some loud, rich, white trans people who rushed, as soon as HRT became a thing, to throw other trans people under the bus as create a diagnostic paternalist medicalism that would keep the middle class white transsexual respectable and shut out everyone else. Instead we are painted with a broad brush as heroes; this is, inside a book like this, annoying to say the least.

Reading this i felt both excited and pretty consistently frustrated. Useful in the scheme of things to have a jumping off point framing? Yes. Lewis is an exceptionally compelling essayist? Yes. but this is why an argument of history and historiography is as important as having handfuls of examples. I do not think this book can practically serve as an inoculation against all the enemy mentalities it describes; hopefully we can build on this work later. ...more

Hal Schrieve and 4 other people liked Sage's review of Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation:

"More like a 3.5, since I enjoyed it so much. A majority of the information included in this takedown of "enemy feminisms" is great, and I learned a lot, especially about feminist movements across the pond. I had a lot of fun reading it and agreed wit" Read more of this review »

Hal Schrieve and 5 other people liked zoë's review of Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against Liberation:

"I'll start with this caveat: I began this book expecting something very different from the end result. Lewis's work is exceptionally researched and provides important information for anyone trying to understand our post-feminist hellscape and how we " Read more of this review »

Hal Schrieve rated a book liked it

Eden II
by Kenny Wroten

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

This is one of those books that shoots itself in the foot by being fantastically ambitious-- more ambitious than the publisher wants, more ambitious than the editor presumably knows what to do with. My reaction to it, mixed as it is, is the reaction This is one of those books that shoots itself in the foot by being fantastically ambitious-- more ambitious than the publisher wants, more ambitious than the editor presumably knows what to do with. My reaction to it, mixed as it is, is the reaction to a really talented, workaholic, philosophical genius who has painted themselves into a dozen different corners by trying to do this kind of epic longform work without really grounding themselves in a specific message for a specific audience. Wroten is a genius of comic book style, and the playfulness alone within the pages of this massive cinderblock makes it worth getting from your library and cracking open (it is also available on library subscriptions to Comics Plus, though is harder to read in that format). It's sort of like big French folio comics, where the gorgeous and trippy stylistic experimentation overrides story-- with the infuriating part being that there is a story here, a damn good story, way better than a lot of people's output over a whole career, and a cast of fascinating characters. We just blow past all the characters too fast, like we're lost in a kaleidoscopic laundry machine, and we get too many psychological, myopic philosophical monologues. But if you are stoned, you can spend a solid three hours just looking at each page a really long time. I want to pay Wroten their due in that respect. They are an insane talent.

Why I'm mad is that Wroten has ideas that are relevant for AI and artificial worlds we find ourselves interacting with now-- this book is about evil corporations stealing our dreams and making them commercial, killing off the planet while buying us off with circuses that they manipulate so that we believe we're close to living our fantasies even as we are transformed into reverse-centaur laborers and dead-eyed consumers of content. The characters in this-- nutty alcoholic professor, beefy circus performer, genius little girl, morose game designer, stoner roommate-- do glow. They just do not get enough room to glow, and there also is no real grounding in actionable political positions in response to the sharp, satirical view we get of the tech world as it exists now. The ending feels edgy and nihilistic, though I think it is meant to be CS Lewis utopic. I am interesting in saving the real world rather than moving into singularity, and I think on this point Wroten and I differ.

Wroten's protagonists across their three printed works all generally seem to be the same type of person, though they present differently and are in different settings: they're dyke-tmasc-adjacent loners who are unfortunately trapped in their own heads.

I think the philosophy is a little too --well, not Atlas Shrugged, but a little too Infinite Jest-y? A little too macho individual! A little too sour on women's potential for connection with one another or you, the narrator, when the narrator and author both clearly love and desire women! ...more

Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it

The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire
by Wayne Koestenbaum

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

I requested Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, because I read about twenty pages of it while staying at my friend Hanu’s house; I did that both because Ben Miller from Bad Gays podcast recommends I requested Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, because I read about twenty pages of it while staying at my friend Hanu’s house; I did that both because Ben Miller from Bad Gays podcast recommends it at least once a season, and because Koestenbaum has a new book coming out: My Lover, The Rabbi, the launch of which I plan to attend on March 17 at McNally Jackson. Hanu probably has The Queen’s Throat because they write about the history of the early modern theater and queerness. They mentioned to me that a recent Renaissance academic convention they attended is mostly queer people and Italians-who-study-early-opera. I like what I know about early opera– that is, mostly Julie D’Aubigny and her gender-bending and fencing. I am not really an opera person–my compulsive music-listening is poisoned by streaming services that let me have more pop-centric and country-girl queens whose songs I don’t even have to hunt down– but I discovered two years back my friend/lover of many years, Aalon, loves opera, as he does disco. Somehow he had kept this from me. He had me watch his favorite production of The Magic Flute a while ago. In Sophie Lewis’s Enemy Feminisms, she opens with a discussion of how she identified with The Queen of the Night, the evil but cool queen from The Magic Flute, and how this connects to feminism’s urges to reclaim even evil women for its purposes. Opera is full of dramatic women dying, who rule the ear with their noise until they go. I went to see Madama Butterfly with my husband in Berlin because I felt I should understand it; two years back, I saw a Zefferelli La Boheme. Opera is stagy, big, and inaccessible. I disagree with Timothee that it is destined for death, but it is an old art form that certainly had more fans in the 1960s; all live performance in the USA now seems intended for the rich. I will say that I feel for Kathy Mattia, Tracey Chapman, Patty Griffin and Shawn Colvin and Theda Hammel more or less what Wayne Koestenbaum seems to feel for Anna Moffo. Though when I listen to Moffo I get it. There’s something in a woman’s voice, celebrating freedom or mourning its loss. Only a woman’s voice? No– Stephin Merritt gives it to me too (his low voice, restrained and held close to the ground, contained, feigning untrained: “Judy Garland set us free”).

Koestenbaum is all into talking about how the opera, an institution involving gender transgression since its birth, became a domestic art form in 1905 when the record companies figured out how to imprison a woman’s voice and bring it home. Thus, a public spectacle–which might be observed in the standing-room section alongside other passionate listeners– could be contained to the home, where recorded music might sanitize the sick, educate the young, or comfort the infirm. Simultaneously, it could transform children:

“One parent writes to Opera News to describe an eleven-year-old boy’s peculiarly intense devotion to opera. This kid has an autograph book: Bampton, Moscona, Novotna, Tibbett…for Halloween he dresses as an astrologer, and made little predictions for all the guests, and here too he was very much at ease. What little predictions can we make about a boy at ease with opera stars and celestial bodies?” (79)

Koestenbaum spends his book investigating what it might mean to live through a woman’s body via the experience of listening to opera, disembodied–appropriating the subjectivity of a woman, powerful, indomitable, flawed and vulnerable to rupture, in place of their own potential sexuality or expression.

Koestenbaum says: “The diva is allowed to sing but not for too long; she is granted the power to soar in a phrase, but only under certain conditions; and when the voice breaks down, she does us how beggared and partial the terms of her triumph have been.” (127) He is bringing this up in the context of operas that are written to be unsustainable, which break the voice.

Quote from Koestenbaum:

“A tableau of two throats, Maria Callas’s and the opera queen’s, ends The Lisbon Traviata. While Callas, on record, spins “an elaborate web of coloratura,” Stephen, the opera queen, whose lover has just abandoned him, “throws his head back with her as she reaches for a climactic high note, but no sound comes out…Stephen’s mouth is open, his head is back, his eyes are closed. Callas is all we can hear.” By lip-syching to Callas, the opera queen is not brought closer to the magical realm of the vocal, the articulate, the expressive, or the open-hearted. In fact, the tableau convinces us that a passion for Callas has closed the queen’s throat, has taken away his power to love. While no sound “comes out” of the queen’s throat (the queen is reduced to the closet by his passion for the opera), Callas on record is singing Violetta, the consumptive courtesan. Stephen may regret that he can’t follow Callas into her hedonistic coloratura, but the subtext of Traviata reminds us that pleasure will kill Violetta as surely as, in homophobic scenarios of AIDS, it has killed gays.” –page 45

There’s something about the flapping throat, the open and vulnerable throat, silent but filled with someone else’s song, relating through the shared experience of obstruction, of desire, of doom, that I find poignant here.
Koestenbaum talks about assimilation, too; about the destiny of the closet, its inevitability, in a pre-Stonewall time when gay culture flourished but gay political rights were a matter of not being spotted. He feels his own opera-queenness has been obliterated by the opening up of other potentials–presumably, those of Sylvester, of Freddy Mercury, or of being a gay art critic. Not a drag queen, though he says “Callas appeals to the drag queen in me” (150). But he likes to look back at a half-invented past, at the bond between women artists and the gay men who aspire to their breaking-out. “Pasolini directs Callas as Medea, and she is attentive, obediently holding her hands to her face. These photographs attest to a specific historic configuration: the gay man venerating the theatrical woman and the woman responding gaily, the woman imitating the gay man and the gay man imitating the woman, the gay man directing and then listening and admiring, the man and woman collaborating.” But he also respects the moment that the diva-woman defies those who would direct or control her, such as when Callas walked out of a gala performance of Norma to protect her throat, defying the Italian president. Just walk out! Just walk out! You can leave! The closet, the structures. Callas said, “I see clearly what is right and wrong for me, and I do not confuse them or evade them.” May all women artists and gay artists see the same. ...more

Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it

The Fruit Machine: Twenty Years of Writings on Queer Cinema
by Thomas Waugh

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

I like this essay collection. I acquired it--I think via my?? therapist?? when I was a teenager, and I didn't get a lot out of it initially beyond watching Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and the 1992 Swoon. There's far more in here than I remembered, and mo ...more

Hal Schrieve rated a book really liked it

Mega Milk: Essays on Family, Fluidity, Whiteness, and Cows
by Megan Milks (Goodreads Author)

Rate this book

Clear rating

1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

The clever nameplay title marks Milks' delve into the realm of journalism-meets-personal-essay, which is kind of the genre that they're meant for outside weird fiction. They are concerned with the world, with power, and with transmutation and empathy The clever nameplay title marks Milks' delve into the realm of journalism-meets-personal-essay, which is kind of the genre that they're meant for outside weird fiction. They are concerned with the world, with power, and with transmutation and empathy within capitalism's ravages of the body and land. I feel uncertain about my own allegiance to this kind of book, which has increasing genre popularity because of its personable marketability-- a comp I can think of is Kate Lebo's "Difficult Fruit", which I find deeply enjoyable and also felt frayed around the edges at times as she attempted to stretch her topic into an artistic shape, eg when she tried to eat a durian and make that something that was tied to her life, personally. Another perhaps closer comp is Adam Zmith's history of poppers where the author frequently goes on digressions about their own identity. It's a very queer way of writing a book, and it can make it more interesting. I breezed through this latest Milks, and I do like their style.

In Mega Milk, Megan Milks talks about whiteness, milkiness, the dairy industry, the diet industry, breastfeeding, transness, purity, and land ownership-- all salient, deeply relevant topics in a landscape , and all ones that they can put their interpretive shoulder to with relative ease. I like that they're working on this book that can stomach both Temple Grandin's squeeze machine and the imaginary internal life of a bull whose semen is sold in freezey vats that you can order online (though I wish the bull semen section had been, as their ex suggested, bolder in its use of the contents of that freezey vat). Their essay about Nazis and milk is one of the only longform pieces I've seen addressing the odd openly white-supremacist dairy fervor; likewise, their essay about their MAGA brother is a sensitive, interesting approach to queer family estrangement and the ways that similar conditions can produce such different people. I like that humans' relationship to the animals we live with is a topic Milks is interested in and turning their dream-fiction reveries toward (and that Lonesome George appears), and I appreciated the connections between the way we treat cats vs cattle, though I also felt that if Milks were going there, they could have gone deeper into the thorny ethical questions around meat consumption, labor, animal welfare, and anti-indigenous land destruction that are at the heart of the colonization. Vegans and radical feminists both point to the dairy industry as a site of perpetual rape, and you can't really argue that it's not; the question of how much of this industry is needed for humanity is sort of an important one, and the more you see animals as sentient individuals, the more spiritually unsettling it is, but Milks mainly lingers on the consumption rather than the animal-end production of this food, while highlighting at times the sadness of calf-loss that adult cows regularly experience. Meat and dairy is what created the geo-segmented monocultures of America's plains, amplified insect and forest destruction, and which tie so deeply to broader climate destruction in our time. The position of American farm workers vs farm owners is a topic that can and should be taken up by creative fiction and nonfiction writers; it still defines almost all our food consumption. Most of our non-fuel emissions come from animal waste. Most land use is for animals or feed. Adulteration of formula and its expense is a safety issue facing queer parents and poor working parents alike in a climate of deregulation and snake oil and false science. Abuse of children and adults working in meatpacking plants deserves its own essay; the effects of hormones used on cattle on milk-consumers' bodies is another direction that plays out in suggestion rather than actuality within the book. The overall feeling I have with this book, as with similar personal-essay-journalism type books, is that we are halfway to a serious journalistic approach to about fifteen different topics. The parts which are rigorous are my favorites-- documenting visits to farms, conversations with farmers, and examination of family history.

They found one of the most interesting knots in our psyche to work with, and they point to all the places its nervous shocks can take us. I think it's definitely a good read for people examining their own white childhoods in milki-land. ...more

topics	posts	views	last activity
YA LGBT Books: * March 2019 New Releases	8	87	Apr 25, 2019 01:43PM
Around the Year i...: [2020] Voting for 2nd Mini-Poll	154	236	Jun 19, 2019 01:38PM

Hal’s Year In Books

Hal Schrieve’s Followers (170)

Hal’s Bookshelves

Hal’s Friends (163)

Hal Schrieve

Goodreads Author

Combine Editions
Hal Schrieve’s books

Series by Hal Schrieve

rss
Hal’s Recent Updates

See a Problem?

Preview — Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane

See a Problem?

Preview — Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell

See a Problem?

Preview — Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis

See a Problem?

Preview — Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis

See a Problem?

Preview — Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis

See a Problem?

Preview — Eden II by Kenny Wroten

See a Problem?

Preview — The Queen's Throat by Wayne Koestenbaum

See a Problem?

Preview — The Fruit Machine by Thomas Waugh

See a Problem?

Preview — Mega Milk by Megan Milks

Topics Mentioning This Author

Hal’s Friend Comments

	Gender Queer: The Annotated Edition by Maia Kobabe (Goodreads Author), Hal Schrieve (Goodreads Author) (Contributor), Dr Sandra Cox (Contributor) 4.27 avg rating — 80,441 ratings — published 2019 — 31 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Out of Salem 3.74 avg rating — 697 ratings — published 2019 — 4 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Nerve Endings: The New Trans Erotic by Tobi Hill-Meyer (Goodreads Author) (Editor), Adonis Alvarez, Teddy Broadbent 4.02 avg rating — 124 ratings — published 2017 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	How to Get Over the End of the World 4.29 avg rating — 101 ratings — published 2023 — 3 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Fawn's Blood 4.25 avg rating — 57 ratings — published 2025 — 5 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Vivian's Ghost 4.88 avg rating — 32 ratings — published 2023 — 2 editions	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Vivian's Ghost: Vol 1-2 4.85 avg rating — 26 ratings — published 2023	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Vivian's Ghost: Vol 3 4.84 avg rating — 19 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Vivian's Ghost: Vol 4 it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 9 ratings	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
	Vetch No. 1: Autumn 2015 by Kay Gabriel (Editor), Stephen Ira (Editor), rl (Editor) it was amazing 5.00 avg rating — 3 ratings — published 2015	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars

Hal’s Year In Books

Hal Schrieve’s Followers (170)

Hal’s Bookshelves

Hal’s Friends (163)

Hal Schrieve

Goodreads Author

Combine EditionsHal Schrieve’s books

Series by Hal Schrieve

rssHal’s Recent Updates

See a Problem?

Preview — Wrath Goddess Sing by Maya Deane

See a Problem?

Preview — Worthy of the Event by Vivian Blaxell

See a Problem?

Preview — Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis

See a Problem?

Preview — Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis

See a Problem?

Preview — Enemy Feminisms by Sophie Lewis

See a Problem?

Preview — Eden II by Kenny Wroten

See a Problem?

Preview — The Queen's Throat by Wayne Koestenbaum

See a Problem?

Preview — The Fruit Machine by Thomas Waugh

See a Problem?

Preview — Mega Milk by Megan Milks

Topics Mentioning This Author

Hal’s Friend Comments

Combine Editions
Hal Schrieve’s books

rss
Hal’s Recent Updates