Joey Carpenter is an insular, gay teenager navigating life in a homophobic town. After a friend’s uncle grooms him, leading him into a creeping relationship that culminates in sexual assault, Joey is eager to escape the explosive aftermath that hangs over him at school and home. As an attendee of the summer getaway Kamp Kromwell, […]
Opening during the spring of 2020, this book refracts the early days of the pandemic with the acuity of a laser, not unlike Straight’s previous novel, Mecca (2022). But if this is the situation of the narrative, its story is the complexity of love and longing, the edgy insistence of the human heart. Straight begins […]
López’s deceptively simple premise unfolds with perfect pacing as a snake suggests that Croco wrap his body around a tree trunk, birds recommend that he flap his (nonexistent) wings, and monkeys encourage him to leap out—all techniques that work brilliantly for the advisers but prove useless for a crocodile. Translated from Spanish by Maude, this […]
Lulu Gardner is a rule follower. As a high school business teacher and single mom to toddler Zoe, the 33-year-old has little time for risk-taking. There was a time when Lulu would sneak out late with her high school boyfriend, Tyler Demming, to play tennis after dark on Washington’s Bainbridge Island. But that was then, […]
Everyone who takes up residence at Nash Athanasiou’s House of Perpetual Welcome on Liakada Bay has agreed to forgive everyone else for all the past misdeeds they admit. But someone seems to be piling up current misdeeds as well, as Poirot acknowledges when Catchpool presses him on the reason they’ve come. Someone, it seems, has […]
The best stories among the 35 set in workplaces in this volume, the second such anthology released in recent months by Whisper House Press, skillfully highlight the breadth of horror. Barry Charman’s “The Ghouls” is a timely tale about the catastrophic impact of misinformation specialists on society. “Cute Aggression” by Emily Flynn-Jones details the increasingly […]
An intertextual story of longing, fidelity, and the role of women in Japanese culture, the novel begins with 2-year-old Riko falling in love with Naruya. Though they eventually marry, it is an unhappy arrangement—she worships Naruya, but he is an unrepentant womanizer. With the help of former monk Mr. Takaoka (who shares the name of […]
Knowing that he only gets a few more kid birthdays before the gifts start turning from cool stuff into things like dress shirts and nose-hair trimmers, Greg is determined to make his upcoming celebration something special. Unfortunately, due to a household mishap, his mom forgot to mark his birthday on the family calendar—and his dad […]
When Giuffre first fell into the orbit of Epstein and his partner/aide de camp, Ghislaine Maxwell, she was a teenager who’d already had long experience with sexual abuse. Her father and a family friend molested her, she writes; later, after escaping an abusive rehab facility, she was raped by a man proffering false promises of […]
In her debut memoir, transgender influencer, actor, and author Rose memorializes events and details during a particularly difficult decade of discovery and desire. Writing with flair and panache, she effortlessly escorts readers across frenetic pages of Grindr app conversation extracts, text exchanges, thoughts about identity (“when does my gender stop being a “gotcha!!!”), and the […]