Latest news with #Bones'
USA Today
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
It's a toxic lesbian vampire summer: ‘Bury Our Bones' is V.E. Schwab at her realest
It's a toxic lesbian vampire summer: 'Bury Our Bones' is V.E. Schwab at her realest V.E. Schwab is hungry. The bestselling author of 2020 breakout 'The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue' has spent most of her career assimilating, presenting herself as less feminine and less queer. She used a pseudonym for her first name, Victoria, in part as a gender-neutral appeal to fantasy readers, a historically male-dominated genre. She was told to temper her ambition. She was told to want less. Over a dozen novels later, Schwab says she's done filtering herself. She's starving to be her most creatively uninhibited self and 'Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil' (out now from Macmillan) is her meal ticket there. 'The thing you realize when you spend so many years just trying to be what everybody else wants and trying not to rock the boat is that you're the only one that drowns,' Schwab tells USA TODAY. 'Bones' lets messy LGBTQ+ villains bite "Bones," which Schwab calls 'three novellas in a trench coat,' follows three vampires – one in 16th-century Spain, one in London in the 1800s and another in Boston, circa 2019. It's a toxic love triangle, a cautionary tale of vengeful exes and a thrilling, genre-defying ode to queer want. It's her most explicitly queer novel yet. After she saw how LGBTQ+ characters in spy thriller series 'Killing Eve' and AMC's remake of 'Interview with the Vampire' were embraced, Schwab was inspired to write a story centering messy, queer villains. Historically, LGBTQ+ characters are typically killed off (see the 'bury your gays' phenomenon) or sanitized. But as queer representation increases in media, audiences crave different, more complex stories. 'I just desperately wanted to write messy people, because when we insist that queer characters be perfect citizens, we say that their queer analogs in reality also can't make mistakes,' Schwab says. 'It's so reductive, it doesn't allow for complexity, it doesn't allow for nuance. It doesn't allow us to take up the same amount of space in the world as our straight counterparts.' Vampires on page and onscreen have long had queer undertones, especially with social outcast, androgyny, seduction and desire not embraced by larger society. Schwab calls 'the turn' from human to vampire the perfect metaphor for queer awakening. She's not the only one ready for more frank representation. AMC's 2022 remake of 'Interview with the Vampire' focused explicitly on queerness, where the original novel and 1994 movie left it up to fans to decode. 'Bones' takes that a step further by centering on female vampires. 'I felt like (vampire stories) often centered men, or if there were female vampires, they kind of were just objects of sexual desire on the periphery,' Schwab says. 'There is an inherent violence to moving through the world in a feminine body. You invite violence by simply existing, you are marked prey by the world. And I thought about the ultimate liberation of moving from prey to predator.' Schwab's characters are liberated – after they turn, they can live authentically. They also all deal with their vampirism differently, an apt metaphor for how coming out can affect people differently. All three characters share a common desire for more than their old life could offer. 'When I say that this is a book about hunger, I mean everything – it's the hunger to be loved, it's the hunger to be seen, it's the hunger to be understood, it's the hunger to take up space in the world, it's the hunger to take what you want as well as what you need. And hunger in the wrong hands is violence. Hunger in the right hands is romance,' Schwab says. 'Hunger, to me, is one of the most universal sensations. … it could be a meal or a life.' New book isn't 'Addie LaRue' – and Schwab is OK with that Still, the leadup to 'Bones' hasn't always felt so joyous. Every time Schwab teases information about the book, people ask her to write a sequel to 'Addie LaRue' instead. She's seen some readers declare 'Bones' an automatic skip because it has lesbian characters. She isn't letting it deter her. 'If I couldn't translate the success of Addie LaRue into sheer unapologetic storytelling, then it was a disservice to that book,' Schwab says. 'There is an inclination when you have such a large success to conform to it.' Instead, she says she wrote 'Bones' for her and hopes readers find her where she is. Early rave reviews confirm her hopes. 'Addie LaRue' taught her to abandon perfectionism and instead focus on purpose. Schwab wants to see both publishing and readers make room for other queer writers, who she says are 'always told to hunger for less or just settle.' In a landscape of exceptionalism where few marginalized writers break through to mainstream success, Schwab's rallying cry is 'more.' 'I'm hungry for stories, I'm hungry for art, I'm hungry for music that makes me want to make (art), I'm hungry for books. I have a voracious appetite for anything artistic,' Schwab says. 'Men are told to hunger, women are told to feed. And I think it's totally OK to hunger.' Biggest books of the summer: Taylor Jenkins Reid surprised herself with 'Atmosphere' Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY's Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you're reading at cmulroy@
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Sport
- Yahoo
Is it time to start worrying about Jon Jones vs. Tom Aspinall?
I wanted to believe UFC CEO Dana White as soon as he uttered the words. It almost felt like a revenge mission for the fight that never happened between Jon Jones and Francis Ngannou. When Ngannou parted ways with the company in 2023, it was the biggest lament of the storied African heavyweight's tenure with the promotion. UFC had both 'Bones' and 'The Predator' on its books for years and couldn't get the one fight an entire sport begged to see across the line. It was mid-December when White made the bold proclamation, roughly a month after Jones predictably outperformed the great Stipe Miocic to defend his heavyweight title. Despite that marquee Jones vs. Miocic pairing, UFC interim heavyweight champion Tom Aspinall was the man on everyone's mind throughout the UFC 309 fight week in New York. White was now adamant that he would deliver the world a unification bout between Aspinall and Jones in the next calendar year. 'I'd say 100%, yeah,' White told the gathered media after the UFC's final event of 2024, when asked if he could guarantee that Aspinall would get a chance at unifying the heavyweight titles in a clash with Jones in 2025. It's important to remember that Jones made no secret of his position. In the aftermath of UFC 309, after a week where Jones constantly threw water on the fan base's burning desire to see him face Aspinall, Jones succumbed to the inquiries and claimed he would sign on the dotted line — but only when his conditions were met. 'If I give him the opportunity to fight me, I want to be so compensated,' Jones said. 'I want to say it — I want that 'f*** you' money, honestly. That's just what it is.' Yet, with no positive word from the champion since, and frustrated sources within the Aspinall camp insisting there is still no agreement in place, is it time to start worrying about about the most anticipated MMA bout of the year? Uncrowned's staff unanimously voted Jones vs. Aspinall as our most-wanted fight of 2025, but we were also unanimous in our sentiments that the efforts to deliver the fight could become a saga. In early January, when discussing when we could start worrying about the contest not coming to fruition, Chuck Mindenhall and I agreed that if there had been no positive word by the time UFC London rolled around in March, the writing would be on the wall. Alas, we didn't have to wait that long. Doubts began to sprout the same week when Joe Rogan declared that Jones wanted $30 million to make it happen. He then walked the statement back and insisted that the heavyweight champion was considering retirement. By the time UFC 311 came around, White's 100% guarantee had some wind knocked out of its sails. Despite still insisting that he was 'very confident' UFC would get a deal done, White noted difficulties to the same media convoy that had listened to his guarantee less than a month prior. 'Nothing is holding it up,' said White. 'It's just a matter of getting it done. It's not as easy to put these types of fights together as people think. They take time. We'll get it done.' Another siren sounded when White declared Islam Makhachev the pound-for-pound best fighter in the world after UFC 311, despite a year's worth of previous debates in which he'd loudly and adamantly declared that Jones would command that status 'as long as he is fighting." 'Yeah, I'll give it to [Makhachev],' White said at the UFC 311 post-fight press conference, following Makhachev's win over Renato Moicano. 'Are you happy? Is everybody happy now?' In recent weeks, White took things a step further when he admitted to The Mac Life that the division will have to move on if Jones hasn't committed to the fight by the summer. '100%,' White said when asked if there was a possibility that Jones would be stripped of the title. 'If we don't get the fight done, we move on, and we make another fight.' Throughout the UFC's previous heavyweight title saga, we saw blame get passed from Jones to Ngannou. Who was standing in the way of the blockbuster clash being made? That depended on when you asked. In 2021, after Ngannou claimed the heavyweight title against Miocic, White quipped that Jones might consider a move down to 185 pounds after seeing the Cameroonian's stellar performance. Jones had expressed via social media that the financials for the fight would have to be right, but White rebuffed his stance, suggesting that he simply didn't want the smoke. 'I could sit here all day and tell you what 'show me the money' means,' White infamously said after UFC 260. 'I tell you guys this all time, you can say you want to fight somebody, but do you really want to? I promise you, we can ask Derrick Lewis and one of these other heavyweights, and they want the fight. If Jon Jones wants the fight, Jon Jones knows he can get the fight. All he's got to do is call and do it.' Three years later, White's tune changed completely. He declared that it was, in fact, Ngannou who'd ran from the UFC and had ducked the Jones fight — an obvious and farcical about-face for all who watched the saga play out in real-time. The promotion simply cannot allow another generational heavyweight matchup slip through its fingers as UFC did with Ngannou and Jones. White is correct in his assessment that a meeting between Jones and Aspinall is the biggest fight that can be made and it is likely the biggest heavyweight fight in UFC history. If that's the case, there should be no hesitation in paying a man White considers the greatest fighter of all time an unprecedented purse to get it over the line. However, hopes of the fight happening are dwindling within Team Aspinall, sources indicated to Uncrowned, as Jones remains silent and the interim champion continues to wait for the call to cement a date for the only fight that matters in the UFC's heavyweight division.
