[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.
Each character’s Roman sea is quite different, but the similarity remains: Each has been tossed up on its shore.
When translator Sarah Booker came to Coffee House with pitches for the translation of both novels of Ojeda’s, the press thought it best to have JAWBONE precede NEFANDO, allowing the former to serve as amuse bouche to the latter’s more toothsome topics.
[TW: sexual abuse, child abuse]