Doing our best since 2009
Lucky Snake My grandmother willed half of her thirty-acre farm estate to the young handyman who frequently visited her house to fiddle with the old wiring and oil the creaky doors, a leather toolbelt slung low on his hips. The document she’d printed from Wills.com stated that this was because he reminded her of my…
This slim ninety-page volume consists of three stories and bears a title inviting feminist interpretation. We Were Forbidden is provocative: Who are “we” and what is forbidden to “us”? Raising these two questions, the author, Jacqueline Harpman, a psychoanalyst whose first novel, I Who Have Never Known Men was last year’s breakout Tiktok success, implicitly…
Serkan Görkemli’s debut short story collection Sweet Tooth and Other Stories follows the lives of queer characters whose paths intersect at various times and in various locales across the Turkish countryside.
In the title story of Emily Mitchell’s most recent collection, The Church of Divine Electricity, a young woman returns to the home of her parents, and her life, once troubled, seems back on track—that is, until she shows up with an eight-pointed star on her forehead that signifies her decision to volunteer for the transhuman…
Hidden River, a memorable novel-in-flash by Sara Lippmann, opens with 35-year-old Cassie, the narrator, receiving an overseas wedding invitation from Sally Sellers, with whom she’s been out of touch for many years. The Sellers family once offered Cassie the illusion of stability; it is unclear what they may offer her now. Though it is written…
In a remote Australian mountain forest there is a black orchid. It is the last of its species: an endling. As Keely Jobe’s debut novel The Endling begins, the orchid decides that “for the sake of its kind, it will hold on a little longer. It won’t flounder. It will remember the way the orchids…