The greatest pleasures of Rikki Ducornet’s Trafik are linguistic, or, more accurately, they are sonic, tactile — in a word, sensual.

I hadn’t been in a fight since the regional jail. Even then, I turtled and let my bigger, uglier opponent whale on me until the other inmates pulled him off before the guards came.

Tropicália, a ripe morsel of a short story collection by Ananda Lima, offers three tightly-wound speculative satires that are hard to swallow but exciting to read.

For years, my father’s stories of growing up in Kurdistan of Iraq were repeated to friends and family; incredible, heartbreaking accounts that often returned to me in moments of reflection, challenging me to learn from his example.

Summers were endless then. The few days spent by the seaside with my parents were followed by weeks of boredom. I have no brothers or sisters, and none of my friends lived nearby.

I was twelve and my brother Daniel was nine when we began our lessons with Sister Marie. She’d somehow gotten word of the boys living motherless on a farm ten miles out in the Puyallup Valley, unable to read or write.

Following these young women from their childhood to their 20s, Macken’s novel grapples with the successes and disappointments that splinter their friendship. This tension between expectation and reality — between dreams and growing up — becomes a driving narrative force in the novel.

What it felt like: A hole in the sky to see through. Staring at the too-bright page craving ready revelation, something like, Oh my God, I am or Oh my God, I love or Oh my God, I will.