Powered by intense imagery and jolts of frank sexuality, Shruti Swamy’s "A House Is a Body" blurs the line between fantastical and naturalistic storytelling with its tales of love, loss, and life lived across cultures. “Blindness”... Read More

An astute observer once remarked to Scottish bookseller Shaun Bythell that “every industry has its porn.” For those who crave the specific “filth” of literary voyeurism: Bythell’s "Confessions of a Bookseller" is here to sate... Read More

A story about sisters and undocumented immigrants, Julia Alvarez’s "Afterlife" evokes the loneliness of grief. A recent retiree and a writer, Antonia is coping with the loss of her husband. She’s also helping a young Mexican... Read More

Gabriel Bump’s Everywhere You Don’t Belong is a spiraling coming-of-age tale about abandonment and perseverance that highlights the moments that made its lead—and some that nearly broke him. A ridiculous opening fight between... Read More

Forty miles and a scenic ferry ride from Los Angeles lies Winter Island, whose residents can be transported back to the mainland in the case of an emergency. But it’s undecided what constitutes an emergency in Evangeline’s life: her... Read More

In Benjamin Markovits’s novel "Christmas in Austin", the Essinger family gathers for the holidays, its siblings traveling from England and the East Coast back to Texas, where festive lights twinkle amid agave plants and the air smells... Read More

E. Patrick Johnson’s oral history "Honeypot" takes a unique approach to preserving the lives of black queer women who were raised in the American South. Using a fictional framework to recount real-life oral histories, Johnson presents... Read More

In Mark Guerin’s "You Can See More from up Here", a nineteen-year-old and his father face up to a conflict of generational ideologies when a workplace incident sends reverberations through their small town. In 1974 in Belford,... Read More