The Río de la Plata—mud-thick and memory-laden—beats beneath every clause of Cantoras, and Caro De Robertis (they/them) times their prose to that estuarial metronome. Some clauses stretch out like low-tide flats while others are cast out to leave periods bobbing like bottle-caps in the sea. Reading it, I heard the waves breaking in my ownRead More
A Must Read for Fans of Carmen Maria Machado: Sympathy for Wild Girls: Stories by Demree McGhee Review
This is a collection of stories about queer Black women that is going to live in my head for a long time. The opening story is about a young woman who has been raised on stories about violence and murder of Black girls like her at the hands of men. She’s consumed by this narrative,Read More
When the Past Won’t Stay Quiet: The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden Review
Living alone in her late mother’s house in Zwolle, Isabel is a quiet and fiercely guarded woman. An uncle bequeathed the house to the family with the understanding that whenever Isabel’s brother Louis married, he would inherit it. Isabel resides there now under a type of suspended claim—that of a caretaker, but not owner. LouisRead More
Calling All Basketball Gays: A Sharp Endless Need by Marisa Crane + Other Sporty Sapphic Books
Happy March Madness season! It’s just a few weeks until the NCAA tournament begins, so in the spirit of basketball, I decided to review a book about it. A Sharp Endless Need (out May 13th) by Marisa Crane is a love letter to basketball and everything that comes along with it—including falling for a teammate. IRead More
A Haunting Gothic About Family in (Climate) Crisis: Private Rites by Julia Armfield Review
As an avid reader of all of Julia Armfield’s fiction, I was eager to pick up her newest novel. From the author of Our Wives Under the Sea (2022), Private Rites (Fourth Estate, 2024) promised to be poignant, haunting, and literary. Set in a future world where environmental disaster has flooded much of the world with ceaseless rains, threeRead More
A Lush Horror Novella Embracing Death and Renewal: Green Fuse Burning by Tiffany Morris Review
“Why did people need to be in nature to process the things that happened to them? Maybe it was because what was thought of as wild did not require a veil—it saw you as you truly were: an animal skulking among animals.” Though I haven’t read a lot of horror, there is plenty of horrorRead More
The Unique Venom of Found Family: Sister Snake by Amanda Lee Koe Review
Su and Emerald are sisters with nothing in common: Su lives in Singapore, playing the perfect wife to her conservative politician husband. Emerald is a queer sugar baby in New York, barely scraping by living with an artist friend. While their current lives look very different and they rarely speak, they have a shared past:Read More
Rachel reviews Small Angels by Lauren Owen
Amazon Affiliate Link | Bookshop.org Affiliate Link Dark, Gothic, and atmospheric, Lauren Owen’s new novel Small Angels (August 2022) is perfect for fans of spooky queer fiction and it’s out just in time for autumn! This book is definitely one to add to your Halloween TBR. Small Angels begins in a small English village with a story thatRead More
Carmella reviews All Men Want to Know by Nina Bouraoui
Content warning: this review references sexual assault In the first chapter of her auto-fictional novel All Men Want to Know, Nina Bouraoui (translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins) writes: “I want to know who I am, what I am made of, what I can hope for; I trace the thread of my past backRead More
Carmella reviews Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin
Trigger warning: this review discusses suicide. What do crocodiles and lesbians have in common? Plenty of things, as I learned from Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile. The novel, first published in Chinese in 1994, is a fragmented, broody, and often puzzling coming-of-age tale. The main story is told through journal entries by our narrator,Read More