What Lindo offers is not necessarily “forgiveness”—for her father, or for anyone else—but rather the privilege of being faithfully and thoroughly observed.
For Ravn, the pregnant body becomes a microcosmic environment tensely defending itself against the violent onslaught of the global conditions of capitalism.
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.