Progression – Signs – Craving – Passage – Judging, a story, Part Five of Five – and judging a story (The following is a work of satire. The people and events depicted, including those based on real people and events, are all entirely fictional.)

*****

In the months since I first began Judging, critic and essayist Alice Bolin released her new book, Dead Girls, a collection which studies, among other topics, the genre the former too was meant to examine. She speaks here about some of the very things I have attempted not just in this particular story, but with our narrative tropes in general. I only hope I have done these ideas some little justice.

*Cathy Ulrich has already tackled much of this (and with much greater authority) in her own Dead Girl series, the latest of which can be found here.

*Rachael de Moravia and Florence Lenaers touch on a few of the other subjects Bolin mentions.

*Tomoé Hill writes about the expectations placed on women from certain other quarters.

*Shane Jesse Christmass and Germán Sierra talk about trends in contemporary literature.

*And, happily, Lauren Weinstein’s Normel Person, a comic strip I mentioned here a little while ago, has found a new home at Popula.

Next issue: September 4^th