Dayswork – Chris Bachelder and Jennifer Habel
DAYSWORK is suspicious of the way we talk about authors, authorship, and authorial collaboration: Whose labor is recognized, and whose is elided?
The Men Can’t Be Saved – Ben Purkert
Just like the professions of advertising and commerce, perhaps even preaching, these men distort reality, create false versions of themselves to convince an audience they are functioning successfully.
[Virginia] never imagined that her ideal lover could be a monster, especially not of her own creation.
Deceit, Gallardo implies here in her stunningly economical prose, does not originate in the individual act of hiding a pregnancy, but in the collective act of condemning a woman to gestate one in secret dread.
Idlewild – James Frankie Thomas
Teenagers . . . Are they interesting, or just irritating?
Brutalities: A Love Story – Margo Steines
The narrative bite of Brutalities is generated by [its] juxtaposition: the magnetic charge between Steines’s longing for gentleness and her attraction to violence.
Sánchez didn’t believe in depression at first—or any mental health condition for that matter. . . . Like me, she’d learned that people just needed “to snap out of it or to pull themselves together.” If only it were that simple.
So Many People, Mariana – Maria Judite de Carvalho
Practiced in Portugal for centuries, censorship had been ingrained in literary culture by the time Maria Judite de Carvalho, one of the country’s most important twentieth-century authors, began writing.
Though the Bodies Fall – Noel O’Regan
The visitors of this “tourist’s dream of a rural Irish cottage” were lost souls who came to the cliffs to find eternal peace. In short, the home was a known suicide spot.
[TW: self-harm, suicide]
A Line in the World – Dorthe Nors
Whether visiting a lighthouse with the author, or a seaside museum, one always senses the nearness, vigor, and life-endangering threat of the churning waters.