In a class on the novel, my teacher, the writer Douglas Glover, wrote in large letters across the blackboard: The Novel is a Poem. Rejecting the idea that the novel reflects reality only in its plot and characters, Glover  (following his own teacher, Robert Day) contends that the novel additionally operates according to “patterns” that…

Fanfiction is having a moment. Anne Hathaway is set to star in a film derived from a Harry Styles fanfic. Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis initially shipped characters from Star Wars. And, of course, the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey series came into the world as Twilight fanfic. Yet despite its indisputable success and…

The tale is as old as the ocean itself: a love affair at the beach with a mysterious man seemingly born from the waves. Sea, sand, sex, and struggle too—these are the concerns of Australian writer Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel, Thirst for Salt. The book opens with an unnamed narrator looking at an online photo…

Published in 1952 after being serialized in a weekly magazine, Alba de Céspedes’s Quaderno Proibito made waves at midcentury for putting a lens to female subjectivity. Ann Goldstein’s new English translation has reinvigorated the novel for contemporary readers and restored de Céspedes, once one of Italy’s most successful authors, to the spotlight. And rightly so:…

“At my funeral one of our friends will describe us as pure, blameless, holy children of the universe, but Lukas and I know, if our friends forget, that these words can be true of the two of us only if they are true of us all.” So says Jutta Carroll, the protagonist of The Martyrs,…

Margot, the famous daughter of punk rock royalty, is fleeing her turbulent, and very public, New York City life for the quiet serenity of Montana. Reeling from an emotionally-abusive relationship with a much older man known only as The Director, the narrator begins her story in an airplane bathroom, blood dripping from a self-inflicted wound…

In Falling Hour, Geoffrey D. Morrison’s impressive first novel, a ruminative young man named Hugh Dalgarno takes an old picture frame to a public park where he has an appointment to sell it to a stranger. Like Godot, the stranger never arrives. The story spans about twelve hours in which Hugh ruminates, alone, on subjects…

Turmoil burrowing deep in the body can produce an outward calm: measured speech, deliberate action, quashed lust. Literature has often matched repression’s timbre, especially when it involves queerness. The serene mountain landscapes of Brokeback Mountain as backdrop to Jack and Ennis’s forbidden and doomed love come to mind.  The Words that Remain by Stênio Gardel,…

Living through war is an experience of surreal dissonance. War ruptures reality and destroys its continuity, so there’s no bridge between life before and after. This is more than just the normal passage of time. War breaks reality, exchanging your normal life for one battered and bloodied by trauma. Bachtyar Ali, a Kurdish novelist, poet,…

The Consequences, a new collection of short stories by Manuel Muñoz set mostly around Fresno in the 1980s, features characters whose lives are precarious in different ways. They’re often queer and sometimes unsure of their identities. Many are Mexican migrants looking for work. But in one way or another, all are living on society’s tattered…

Allegra Douglass, a professor of philosophy in New York City, is living the dream. Recently been promoted to tenure with a named chair, she has a loving partner, the respect of (most of) her colleagues, talented students, and work she enjoys. She’s also Black, and she’s traveled a long and hard road from her difficult…

Elizabeth Shick’s debut novel The Golden Land is a significant achievement. In it, the microcosm of one family’s experiences gestures toward the macrocosm of Myanmar’s complex history. Long called “the golden land” for the golden pagodas and stupas dotting the landscape, Myanmar has endured beyond name changes and shifting political tides. In The Golden Land,…