Surreal, intense, and intimate. Moving seamlessly through a myriad of cities and countries, Megan Fernandes’s The Kingdom and After is a dreamlike trip charting the temporal human experience in a world that seems to be shrinking. A mix of prose-like paragraphs and...
Park explores the spiritual resilience of women in the face of colonial and domestic violence. Christina Park’s contemplative, slow-burning debut novel The Homes We Build on Ashes reaches far—geographically, emotionally, and spiritually. Following the life of a Korean...
This book is pure Piepzna-Samarasinha—tough and full of desire; it needs to be flaunted in all its glory. Bodymap by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha uses Dawn’s quote as a preface, setting up a bold framework for what’s to come. This book is pure...
The protagonists who inhabit Boy Lost in Wild, Brenda Hasiuk’s debut collection of short stories, exist in the brief space lodged between childhood and adulthood. The protagonists who inhabit Boy Lost in Wild, Brenda Hasiuk’s debut collection of short stories, exist...
Once in a while, a writer comes along who speaks to your heart, gut, and funny bone all at the same time. Kathleen Winter is one of those writers. Her story “Knives,” from her engaging short story collection The Freedom in American Songs, starts breezily—a boy with...
We enter the narrative after the fight, after the authorities are called, after the unnamed protagonist leaves and the rain has started. “She has always liked that,” drums the narrator in a tone which persists as poetically matter-of-fact, at times as bleak as the...
Leah Horlick’s second collection of poetry is a fictionalized autobiography that focuses on a violent lesbian relationship. Leah Horlick’s second collection of poetry, For Your Own Good, is a fictionalized autobiography that focuses on a violent lesbian relationship....
Each word in Leak, Kate Hargreaves’s debut collection of poetry, is deliberate, carefully chosen to test the boundaries of the English language. In Leak, nouns become verbs, verbs become nouns, words shift meaning, and prose flows loosely, free of punctuation. These...
Julia Leggett’s debut collection, Gone South and Other Ways to Disappear, is a look into the lives of eight women as they experience varying degrees of disappointment. These are stories that take place just as the rug of how-the-protagonists-thought-life-should-be is...
Elaine Woo’s debut poetry collection opens with a birth, a book slipping into life surrounded by a “throng of reading witnesses.” Cycling with the Dragon is this book, a collection interested in the intersection of life and craft, the forming and gathering of thought...