“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,…

When I was nine or ten, my family vacationed at Disney World. The Magic Kingdom was indeed magical, though the aspect that remains hooked in my memory thirty years later isn’t the Florida sunshine, or my autographs from Mickey and Minnie, but the Carousel of Progress.  Situated inside a futuristic-themed Tomorrowland, the Carousel of Progress…

Few of the characters in The Company of Strangers, Jen Michalski’s third collection of short stories, meet as literal strangers. Rather, Michalski relays states of strangeness forged in breakups, homecomings, familial estrangement, and immature love. Whether the relationships are new or long-term, Michalski’s characters form intimacies by pushing and pulling each other into altered states.…

This collection of dizzying and dazzling dystopian fairytales propels the reader through a sexually intriguing, violent, shy, erudite, and disingenuous mind—think Glee Club and High School Musical meet American Psycho. In these stories, image and surface are exploited and controlled by a series of sexually obsessed narrators. “You are only whatever text I write across…

Anca L. Szilágyi’s latest novel, Dreams Under Glass, follows Binnie, an aspiring diorama artist and struggling millennial dealing with her quarter-life crisis while trying to survive in New York City. She has a decent job as a paralegal, a job she must keep while finding time to fulfill her creative ambitions and social obligations. When…