A novel by Victor Pelevin
A Hu-Li is at least 40,000 thousand years old. She’s also a fox in both the literal and the vernacular sense of the word—a fox who happens to be a member of a species who morphologically resemble human women. And live a long time without growing old—or even, necessarily, mature.
A Hu-Li and her sisters are sexual predators. They are, in other words, a top-level crypto-predator species that happens to feed on human sexual energy. Obviously, then, a fox’s perfect disguise is as a high-class prostitute. What better character to skewer the norms of society than the prostitute who pops the bubble of every hypocritical prick along her journey to enlightenment? A Hu-Li and her sisters are not human and don’t care about our values. A Hu-Li has her own. She’s not a liberated sex worker, she’s a predator.
An enticing one, too: she wears her years of experience with cunning wit, style, pragmatic grace and imperial wisdom—most of the time. The narrative sweet spot Pelevin has found in The Sacred Book of the Werewolf
Reza Aslan has written an important and wonderfully readable book on the history of Islam. A devout Muslim who cares deeply about his religion, Aslan is also a thoughtful humanist. No god but God generously, gracefully and intelligently incorporates both these sets of values. It’s important for Americans to read this book: we keep asking, Why do they hate us?, and reply foolishly with thoughtless answers like, Because they’re jealous of our freedoms (as George W. Bush has maintained for the past several years). More likely, it seems to me, the answer lies in our own ignorance: what do we really know about Islam? Recently I was asked to teach an Introduction to the Humanities class at a community college. The regular instructor bailed out at the last minute; I was given a textbook on a Friday and told to be prepared to start teaching the following Monday. I read fast, but knew I had to skim most of the required textbook in order to prepare. One of the chapters I read in detail, though, was the one on the history of Islam. To my horror is read, in this widely used textbook, the authors’ claim that the Prophet Mohammed married Fatima. This kind of ignorance of other cultures and other faiths is deeply offensive. In this case, Fatima, as we all should know, was the Prophet’s daughter (his wife’s name was Khadija). How could the authors (an archeologist and a theologian, both of prestigious U.S. universities) implicitly accuse Mohammad of a crime—incest—that all the children of Abraham find offensive? 
Like a sacrificial virgin balanced on a ziggurat in an earthquake, Jean Genet step-dances in fits and trances, and in his resolute Fall disavows the validity of received notions of ontological and epistemological positioning. Genet’s narrators are Schroedinger’s cats: undecidably both dead and alive. Genet’s narrators are also liquid. These narrators, as for example Jean in Funeral Rites, rise to the level of their surroundings in a dialogical environmentalism (in the sense that the mental is enturned: en-vir–always already turning again) that has them “communicating” (in the sense that a dance is a communion) with “the other” (a prescriptive term about to be overturned) outside of the space-time continuum of Newtonian physics and Cartesian ontology, but still within the purview of persistent and visionary rhythms. 
