Feeld Guide
This list of recommendations was written for a newsletter sent by Mal, the journal funded by Feeld.
On Taboo: This Is Pleasure by Mary Gaitskill
First published in The New Yorker, this novella tackles the intricacies of one of the first, and perhaps one of the most delicate cases within the #MeToo ideology. Never naming a certain oversexed magazine publisher, Gaitskill captures the affection and innocence at the heart of all office inappropriateness, making it easy to see how waters can appear murky to some and clear to others.
On Zoophilia: La Bête by Walerian Borowczyk
I watched this movie during a particularly bleak vacation, thinking it was a decadent French period piece, perhaps a clever retelling of Beauty and the Beast. Instead, I stayed up late, alone, to see the work of “a genius who also happens to be a pornographer,” which somehow snuck under the radar of Netflix’s censors. A cult sex horror film, La Bête’s take on bestiality gave it trouble even with European distribution upon its release in 1975.
On Sadomasochism: Dining With Humpty Dumpty by Reba Maybury
I met Reba—the academic, the dominatrix, the radio host, the writer—in Glasgow at a reading. Her story was funny, astute, and sad, so I couldn’t wait to read her novella, which lightly fictionalizes a relationship between herself and a client: a feeder sub with bad politics. Reba describes each character’s pleasure as two inconsistent orbs that never quite overlap. For the reader, though, the pleasure comes from the language’s capacity to handle so much vulnerability.
On Incest: The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer by Jennifer Lynch
From the woman whose birth inspired a mysterious worm-like screaming infant in David Lynch’s Eraserhead, comes a book to accompany his TV series Twin Peaks, which centers around the rape and murder of an adolescent girl by her own possessed father. Published in 1990, Jennifer Lynch wrote this novel from the perspective of Laura Palmer at her father’s request when she was 22, apparently. She has said she knew the character so well, it was like automatic writing.
On Promiscuity: Weird Fucks by Lynne Tillman
One of Tillman’s lesser known books thanks to a troubled publishing history, this novella is also one of her most candid. It documents the time spent broke and restless in a writer’s waning youth, flavored with (but not married to) that 60s and 70s New York artists’ loft style, sometimes traveling outside of the city and sometimes veering into introspective self-deprecation. The fucks described are sex acts: weird fucks, during weird circumstances that are delightful to read about.