Valerie Stivers

Red Hook

Writer at Freelance

Catholic sensualist. Hostessing fundamentalist. Culture for all. Food column @parisreview; Books column @compactmag_ .

Articles

Ross Douthat’s Serious Fantasy

3 weeks ago | compactmag.com | Valerie Stivers

What does it take to get a fantasy novel published these days, if not a famous name and a great manuscript? Judging by The Falcon’s Children, a high epic fantasy by conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, it seems the answer is a gimmick of some kind—ultra-violence, soft-core sex, identity politics.
Amanda Knox creeps me out

3 weeks ago | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

amanda knoxCancel cultureCrimeCulturediverseFeminismItalyMemoirMurderPrisonTabloids Amanda Knox starts off her new memoir, Free: My Search for Meaning, with a barbed anecdote: her mother told her once when she was a child that she would have “an extraordinary life”. And she has, though not in the way that any mother would wish for.
The Girlfriend Experience

4 weeks ago | fairfieldsuntimes.com | Valerie Stivers

The zany and joyous female embrace of an extreme kind of porn-scripted sexuality is a new literary trend, or maybe a new life trend, seen recently in Miranda July’s All Fours, and now in the disturbing grunge confection Paradise Logic, by Sophie Frances Kemp.
The gender vibe shift and its discontents

1 month ago | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

andrea long chuautogynephiliaCatholicismChristianityCulturedetransitiondiverseHomosexualityMilo YiannopoulosTransgender Twenty-six-year-old Miles Yardley — formerly known in downtown New York City as a musician, influencer, and model named Salomé — publicly renounced his trans identity this year, sold his women’s clothing online, and began posting grim details to his 20,000 or so followers on X about how his medical transition as a teenager has affected his body over the past decade. Yardley...
Rich Kids Want to Die Too: Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized

1 month ago | therumpus.net | Valerie Stivers

I used to play a game when I lived in Moscow in my early twenties. I would see how deep into a flirtation I could get while pretending to be a Russian girl; in actuality, I am American. My Russian-language skills were limited, but in a famously patriarchal culture, a young woman like me wasn’t expected to talk much.
Sophie Lewis’s Case Against Feminism

2 months ago | compactmag.com | Valerie Stivers

Enemy Feminisms: TERFs, Policewomen, and Girlbosses Against LiberationBy Sophie LewisHaymarket Books, 320 pages, $22.95‘Most people live in a crackpot world where the sky is green,” Curtis Yarvin wrote recently. And while “most people,” of course, don’t, extremists on either side of a given issue often do.
How porn swallowed everything

2 months ago | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

Andrea DworkinCulturediverseDrakeEroticaEroticismFashionHip hopkendrick lamarpornSuper Bowlsydney sweeney During the Super Bowl, some 127 million viewers witnessed an up-close parade of gleamy-creamy jiggling breasts covered in cantaloupe-coloured spandex as part of an advertisement for . . . breast-cancer awareness, sponsored by pharmaceutical company Novartis.
From Mishima to Mangione

2 months ago | compactmag.com | Valerie Stivers

The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, who lived from 1925 to 1970, styled himself as an “aesthetic terrorist,” and carried out one actual act of terror in 1970, leading a far-right coup against the Japanese government. When the coup failed, he committed seppuku, the ritual disembowelment by sword traditionally reserved for samurai warriors. The combined lurid elements of his persona have made him difficult to categorize.
How the world fell for ‘romantasy’

Jan 22, 2025 | unherd.com | Valerie Stivers

CulturefantasyPublishingRomanceromantasySelf-publishingUS In an opening chapter of Moby-Dick, Herman Melville captures the American scene in the whaling village of New Bedford, Mass. There are “savages outright, many of whom yet carry on their bones unholy flesh”; “Green Vermonters and New Hampshire men”; lunks and hicks and “bumpkin dandies” in beaver hats and swallow-tailed coats “girdled with a sailor-belt and a sheath knife”.
Living the Gospel on the streets of Dorothy Day's New York

Jan 18, 2025 | oursundayvisitor.com | Valerie Stivers

The best way to encounter Day in today’s New York is “volunteering at the house and attending Mass,” her granddaughter Martha Hennessy told me. “Maryhouse is where she died, and I feel her presence there,” Hennessy added. Maryhouse and St. Joseph’s House are a few blocks apart and, though both are active residences, anyone can knock on the door to see the public areas.