Song of a Reformed Headhunter

Weekly column written for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . Dale Peck, the author of Hatchet Jobs , strikes again. And again. At the gay Republican journo and pundit Andrew Sullivan, whose self-hating screeds supporting the traditional family, compassionate conservatism, and other such mythical beasts deserve buckets of vitriol but receives at Peck's hand the scalpel of savage, and very funny, wit. Here's how the review of Sullivan's Out on a Limb: Selected Writing 1989–2021 (Simon & Schuster) begins: "Andrew Sullivan first showed up on my radar in 1991, an innocuous blip that gave no indication of the full-frontal assault about to be launched on the American left. I was working for OutWeek at the time, and I’d been tasked with proofing an interview between a seraphically beautiful young journalist named Maer Roshan and the recently appointed editor in chief of The New Republic (who, if I’m being completely honest, wasn’t so bad-looking...

Review of What Burns by Dale Peck (USA: Soho Press, 2019) By Jee Leong Koh Published in Singapore Unbound's SP Blog Content warning: child molestation and violent rape. This review contains spoilers. Reading Dale Peck’s story collection What Burns , I do not find an irreverent provocateur, didactic narcissist, or campy satirist, as other readers have claimed to find. Instead, I think I see the outline of a moralist, of a higher sort. These seven stories, written or published over a span of 12 years, from 1999–2010, are remarkably consistent in probing contemporary beliefs in right and wrong, good and evil. They rub the price tags off our bottled possessions and packaged fantasies to see what the labels hide. Mark Athitakis’s review in the Post wastes too much space in rehearsing Peck’s notoriety (his hatchet jobs on other writers, his attack on Pete Buttigieg) but he fastens correctly on “a prevailing theme” in Peck’s writings, “the error of refusing to see betrayal and dev...

More kinds words for CONNOR & SEAL, these from H.L. Hix: "Its architecture is dynamic, and then poem by poem it is elegant and vivid. I especially love "Hi Harlem" and "I Don't Believe in the Long Arc of Justice" and "Strongman from Qinshi Huangdi's Tomb" in the first section, and then the way "form" and "content" (that artificial distinction!) work together in the second section to draw me in and draw me forward is magical."—H.L. Hix Free shipping anywhere if you buy from my indie publishers ! Praise “What are the routes, routines, and disruptions for eros in an all too recognizable dystopia? I feel burnt and humbled by entering the near future hotly projected in this book. Jee Leong Koh’s Audenesque gift for tilting and tipping rhyme and meter creates a craquelure of lines upon these poems’ fine and strong shapes. The fierce sun of his intelligence intervenes to vivify neighbourhood and lovers’ voices in o...

Weekly column for the Singapore Unbound newsletter. Sign up here . If you can't kill it, I guess you may as well call it Evergreen. Launched in 1957, with work by Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Schorer, and James Purdy, Evergreen Review thrived for 16 years on scandalizing American propriety with audacious writing. Then it went silent for many years before it was revived on-line in 1998, and again in 2017. Now under the leadership of publisher John Oakes and Editor-in-Chief Dale Peck, the magazine has just published the first of four installments of its Fall issue, and is again kicking against the pricks. Headlining the issue is Guatemalan journalist José García Escobar's report on the immigrant caravan traveling from Honduras to the United States. Having embedded himself among the refugees, he was privy to their stories of hardship and to the moral ambiguities of covering them. Looking at the problem from the other end, the American side, Natascha Elena Uhlmann ar...