A novel about memory and its loss, Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy is written in short chapters that feel as though they were taken from a daily journal. It is possible they were. According to the jacket copy, Dislocations is a work of fiction. But the narrator’s friend and central concern, a woman named M.L. who…

“What would it be like to step into the waters of somewhere beyond the stars?” asks one character from Chloe N. Clark’s Patterns of Orbit. Meshing genre elements from speculative, horror, and science fiction, the twenty-five stories in the collection repeatedly pose this question, exploring what it means to be uncertain, what it means to…

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…