This year, we’re highlighting indie bookstores that focus on intersectional LGBTQ+ literature. Save a queer, read a book!

Giovanni’s Room (Philadelphia, PA)

Giovanni’s Room has the bragging rights to being the oldest LGBTQ+ bookstore in the US. A Philly favorite selling both new and used books, it’s part of the queer family that is Philadelphia AIDS Thrift, a gem whose mission is “to sell lovely, useful, interesting, amusing, and sometimes mysterious stuff.” A federally recognized 501(c)(3), they’ve distributed over $5 million to local organizations committed to the fight against HIV/AIDS. Don’t miss Philly Queer Book Club, hosted monthly by the charming and stylish self-proclaimed Book Club Kid, Danny Maloney! You’ll read classics like Sula, Zami, and Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, as well as hot new titles.

Firestorm Books (Asheville, NC)

This queer, radical activist co-op has been a feminist collective and social movement since 2008, and they need your help! Like many small businesses in Asheville, the worker-owned, non-hierarchal, self-managed business was hit hard by Hurricane Helene. Sales are down, costs are up, capitalism is the worst. The bookstore, which provides critical community space and serves as a hub of mutual aid, has been enlisting community support to bridge their gap in revenue and expenses. Even so, they’re continuing to facilitate civic programming like “Your Book Club Has Been Designated a Terrorist Threat,” which disseminates essential knowledge about the landmark Dallas-Fort Worth case after activists were convicted of “material support for terrorism.” Join this beloved indie, become a Firestorm Sustainer today! 

Pocket Books (Lancaster, PA)

Owned by three best friends (who we all want to be our best friends), Pocket Books is an independent, queer, feminist indie committed to “the idea that bookstores are places for communities to share knowledge, wisdom, resources, and connections.” If you’re looking for a hot new title (Horror? Sexy? Sexy Horror?), their book recs are fantastic! They curate an “intentional and eclectic” stock of books, including titles by local writers and small presses; their monthly subscription, Pocket Picks, features early career writers and prioritizes women, queer writers, and writers of color. Pocket Books is so popular and beloved, they recently doubled in size and love, opening their second location in Lancaster, PA. They ship nationwide and offer 15% on all pre-orders! 

Loyalty Bookstores (Washington, DC)

Founded by Hannah Oliver Depp, a Black and Queer bookseller, and now co-owned by Christine Bollow, a Queer, disabled, and biracial Filipina bookseller, Loyalty highlights diverse voices to reflect Washington, DC’s intersectional community. Their motto is, “We Like Books, We Like You, Welcome.” There are many book clubs to choose from: Meet Cute, which reads across sub-genres within Romancelandia; In the Margins, which focuses on marginalized authors; the Big Ass Book Club for ambitious books; and Agatha Christie & Sherry, which pairs Christie with sherry and tea. Loyalty Bookstores is located in Petworth, DC, in the Pop Up at Walter Reed. 

Asbury Book Cooperative (Asbury Park, NJ)

Asbury Book Cooperative is a community-run 501(c)(3) nonprofit bookstore, supported and run by members and volunteers who are always delighted to offer their take on a great book. Selling both new and used books (including a pretty solid poetry section for a store of its size), and located downtown in gay Asbury Park, ABC is an excellent stop on your way to the 5^th Avenue Beach. Not only are there readings, workshops, and book clubs—such as an excellent Racial & Social Justice Reading Group—but Friday nights at ABC are usually a great time to catch live music!

Inkwood Books (Haddonfield, NJ)

Located in walkable downtown Haddonfield, not far from a beloved water ice shop, Inkwood Books serves as a community hub, holding story times, book clubs, and walk-ins. They carry more than 18,000 books, including a dedicated children’s section and independent authors and presses. A lively, charming, and welcoming indie, it’s beloved by locals for being a South Jersey “gem.” Pride Book Club runs monthly on Tuesdays! 

Rainy Day Books (Kansas City, KS)

A fan favorite and a highlight at 2024 AWP-Kansas City, Rainy Day Books is one of the oldest independent bookstores in the region. It began in the 1970s as a used bookstore with a unique paperback exchange, enabling customers to trade books for credit. Now, Rainy Day Books is deeply involved in the local community, hosts hundreds of author events each year, and promotes literacy as a cultural hub for readers of Kansas City. They partnered with Lead to Read KC to host the “Story by Story: KC Book Fair,” celebrated queer AWP at Missie B’s, and recently hosted a “Potions & Devotions Tour.” 

Under the Umbrella (Salt Lake City, UT)

Under the Umbrella is a proud safe space for queer folks of all ages to congregate: queer authors, queer stories, queer perspectives. “No other bookstore in the area specifically caters to the queer community,” writes owner Katlyn Mahoney. The indie, which includes a café, also features small presses and self-published writers. Under the Umbrella, prioritizes, “the stories of Black queers—especially Black transgender women—Indigenous queers, and other queers of color, disabled queers, fat queers, two-spirit people, intersex people, asexual and aromatic people, incarcerated queer people, queer sex workers, and other identities within the queer community that experience further marginalization, even within the queer community.” They offer HRT support meetings, skill building workshops, pop-up markets for local artisans, and Queer Speed Date events. For their contributions, they received the ACLU Torch of Freedom Award in 2024 and the 2026 University of Utah Pinnacle of Pride Award.

Women & Children First (Chicago, IL)

Women & Children First celebrates over 45 years of inclusive feminist bookselling in Chicago. They carry 20,000 books that center marginalized voices, facilitating programming and in-kind donations to offer safe, inclusive spaces for the Windy City. They have ongoing partnerships with Chicago Books to Women in Prison, Liberation Library, and Chicago Abortion Fund. Favorite community events include Weekly Morning Storytime, Banned Books Book Club, and a regular array of visiting author events. They’ve even hosted Hot Potato Hearts, a speed dating event that pairs people randomly (some would say “adventurously”) regardless of gender or sexual orientation. Find your personalized reading list for talking to teens, abolishing ICE, or freeing Palestine.

BookWoman (Austin, TX) 

This historic institution is one of the oldest feminist bookstores in the United States. BookWoman was founded in 1975 and is celebrating 50 years of continued community outreach. Originally launched as a women’s collective (The Common Woman Bookstore), it focuses on feminist and LGBTQ+ literature with an emphasis on intersectionality. There are regularly scheduled readings, open mics, poetry evenings, and speakers. BookWoman creates a community space for learning, discussion, and activism. In 2026, this indie is often described as a safe haven and sanctuary bookstore in a red state.

The Nonbinarian Bookstore (Brooklyn, NY)

The Nonbinarian hot pink book bike can often be spotted throughout Brookly, distributing free books to readers in “book deserts” throughout the city. Part of the post-2020 explosion of queer indie bookstores in NYC, The Nonbinarian centers trans, enby, and queer voices with a focus on visibility and community-building. Established in 2022 as a mobile mutual-aid initiative, it has evolved into a queer social hub and community space in Crown Heights. The Nonbinarian is a trans, disabled, Asian-owned collective that is volunteer powered, exclusively queer, and carries new, used, and free books, as well as gifts, and resources. Upcoming events include: Quiet Queers (Silent!) Reading Hour, a T4T Clothing Swap, and bike pop-ups at the Brooklyn Public Library.

Always Here Bookstore (Portland, OR) 

This community-rooted, queer bookstore is a recent addition to the indie landscape. Thanks to community support, the pop-up recently moved into a physical storefront in Portland’s North Williams area and has been creating space for queer gathering. The indie features books with intersectional social justice themes and curates for a diverse readership, including queer and trans people, Latinx communities, and neurodivergent readers. Always Here Bookstore identifies as a living queer community, and they host community gatherings, queer book swaps, and member social hours. 

All She Wrote Books (Somerville, MA) 

Another newer addition, All She Wrote Books is an inclusive queer feminist bookstore that centers socially conscious nonfiction and fiction. Its mission as “an intersectional, inclusive feminist and queer bookstore” is to “support, celebrate, and amplify underrepresented voices through a thoughtfully curated selection of books spanning across all genres.” All She Wrote Books hosts queer-friendly book clubs and community gatherings, facilitates trans and nonbinary voices programming, and offers “Friends of Ruby” memberships for local readers. Upcoming events include a Bookworm Comedy Show, Gentle Yoga for Booklovers, and Queer Literary Speed Dating. After starting as a three-shelf Ikea cart, they’re now at their new brick-and-mortar location in Somerville! 

The post Queer Bookstores Across America to Support This Independent Bookstore Day appeared first on Electric Literature.

Whatever their effect, there’s no doubt that these in-between spaces make perfect breeding ground for stories. The term “mofussil,” used for places outside the major metropolitan cities in India, expresses the intricacies of these locations perfectly. These mofussil spaces can be small towns where everyone knows everyone’s business, where anonymity is impossible and the bonds of community are still strong. On the other hand, it can also refer to the tier-2and tier-3 cities—once smaller, they now sprawl in all directions, rapidly re-inventing themselves. None of these spaces are silent backgrounds. They are active presences that shape the lives and histories of their people, particularly in a country like India. Perhaps this is why stories set away from the major Indian cities are becoming popular with global audiences. The latest example of this subtle shift is the success of the film Homebound, which was on the shortlist for Best International Feature Film at the 2026 Oscars.

The following seven novels are set in these twilight places spread across the length and breadth of the country. Whether it’s the Himalayas looming in the background or the sea on the edge of the town, a place in the terai or a dusty town hard to find on the map—these places make for stories worth telling, sometimes acting as catalysts, sometimes as accomplices.

English, August by Upamanyu Chatterjee

Upamanyu Chatterjee’s English, August is the story of Agastya Sen, who has been posted to Madna after joining the elite civil service. This hot, dusty town is far removed from Kolkata and Delhi, where Agastya has spent most of his life, and the contrast between his life so far and the life he is expected to lead in this outpost lies at the center of this darkly humorous novel. Chatterjee brings the quintessential small town of the ’80s to life through descriptions of slow-moving bureaucracy and the portrait of a place where cattle camp in the corridors of government offices and the walls of buildings are splotched “maroon with paan spittle.” As Agastya’s existential crisis intensifies, Madna refuses to stay in the background, gradually becoming the catalyst to his struggles and driving the novel towards its conclusion.

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai

Kiran Desai’s novel moves between New York and Kalimpong, a small town in the Eastern Himalayan region, weaving the stories of multiple characters. There’s a retired, Cambridge-educated judge clinging to colonial ways; his granddaughter, Sai; and their cook’s son, Biju, an undocumented immigrant struggling in New York. The action unfolds during a tumultuous period in the region’s history as the Nepali-speaking majority demands its own state, turning the quiet, misty town into a “ghost town.” With the mighty Kanchenjunga looming over its treacherous terrain, a sharp class divide and political tensions on the rise, Kalimpong becomes an active presence shaping the trajectory of its characters’ lives.

The Small-Town Sea by Anees Salim

Set in an unnamed small town where the sea is a living, breathing presence, The Small-Town Sea is narrated by an unnamed 13-year-old boy. The boy has moved to this “small, depressing town” from a “big, overcrowded city” to fulfil the wish of his dying father. This mofussil town thus becomes the space where he must draw the map of his many griefs, including the life he has left behind. Written in sparse prose in the form of a letter addressed to a literary agent who had rejected his father’s manuscripts, The Small-Town Sea captures the claustrophobic feeling of growing up surrounded by the anxieties of childhood.

Lunatic in My Head by Anjum Hasan

Hasan’s Lunatic in My Head is set in ’90s Shillong and tells the story of three characters who live most of their lives in their heads. Eight-year-old Sophie Das, aspiring civil servant Aman Moondy, and college lecturer Firdaus Ansari are all “dkhars”—outsiders—whose identities become closely intertwined with their feelings for their city. Shillong, with its hilly terrain and rain-soaked streets where “pine trees dripped slow tears,” charms while also making the characters long to leave it all behind. That push-and-pull is at the heart of this novel in which nothing grand happens, nevertheless offering insight into a space that is irrevocably tangled with the lives of the people who inhabit it.

The Courtesan, Her Lover and I by Tarana Husain Khan

The Courtesan, Her Lover and I is set in Rampur and narrates the story of Rukmini, who returns to her hometown with her husband after a few years in Dubai. Unhappy with her teaching, she almost unwillingly begins researching the cultural history of Rampur, which leads her to the nineteenth century courtesan Munni Bai Hijab, a poet herself and muse of the famous Urdu poet Dagh Dehlvi. As we move in time, Rampur stays in the background as a powerful force. It’s a city in flux, a city where “the circle of life is transcribed within the mohallas,” but which is also turning into a “smart city” even as its men—however well-meaning—tend to define the trajectory of a woman’s ambition. This in-betweenness shapes the life of Rukmini, weaving Rampur closely into the stories of both women.

Alipura by Gyan Chaturvedi, translated by Salim Yusufji

Gyan Chaturvedi’s Alipura is set in the Hindi heartland of the late 1960s. The novel takes readers to a typical village to meet the Dube family, who are low on money but high on dreams and struggling to fulfill their ambitions, however small. Chaturvedi uses humor and satire to bring out the bleak realities of life in a small village riddled with casteism, corruption, outdated beliefs, and a deeply patriarchal mindset. Alipura is a place where women are supposed to stay away from cosmetics because they tend to bring “dishonour to the family” while masculinity and muscle-power go hand-in-hand. A site of colorful characters with bleak futures, Alipura defines as well as confines its characters. It is a place where dreamers thrive but dreams refuse to come true.

The Folded Earth by Anuradha Roy

Set in Ranikhet, a small town in the foothills of Northern Himalayas, The Folded Earth is the story of Maya, a young widow. She has come in search of sanctuary, and The Folded Earth shows a small town becoming a safe haven. At the same time, it reveals the fragility of such peace and tranquillity when faced with powerful local forces that thrive on conflict. Roy gives local color in descriptions of this charming town as well as through characters like the aristocratic Diwan Sahib and the young Charu—people who can only be found in India’s mofussils. Never in a hurry to reach its destination, The Folded Earth moves at a languid pace, capturing the feeling of strolling along winding, hilly roads of the town it describes.

The post 7 Novels That Let India’s Smaller Towns Shine appeared first on Electric Literature.

These formidable female brains aren’t a modern phenomenon. As a Shakespearean, I’ve studied how the teenage girls in his plays use their newly sharpened cognitive abilities to challenge the status quo and craft their own fates. Juliet Capulet is nearing “the change of fourteen years” when she imagines, orchestrates, and almost achieves her forever future with Romeo—against the tyrannical will of her father and Verona law. And while popular images of Ophelia cast her as a vulnerable, hysterical girl waiting for the perfect guy to save her, she actually spends most of Hamlet observing, remembering, and speaking out about the rotten Danish history that the corrupt court seems intent on forgetting.

My book, Monsters in the Archives, chronicles what I discovered when Stephen King granted me what Shakespeare couldn’t: unprecedented access to early drafts of his iconic works, with all of his handwritten margin notes and edits. In one of our conversations, I asked King about the changes I saw him making to an early, very inhuman version of Carrie. He told me why and how he rewrote her as “an All-American girl,” a bullied teenager that readers could root for on some level as she harnesses her mental powers to flip the script. What he (like Shakespeare) understood was that girls who use their brains aren’t pathological exceptions, but rather everyday agents of change that audiences and readers recognize.

The following seven stories feature girls who use their cognitive abilities to challenge social norms and imagine their own destinies. They don’t always succeed in the ways they hope—and, in one case, girl power threatens to destroy all of humanity, not just the prom—but they all turn their minds toward making better futures.

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers

McCullers’ novel, set in a 1930s mill town, tracks multiple interconnected characters over the course of one year; but it’s Mick Kelly’s heart and mind that power the story’s lonely hunt for meaning. Mick begins as a 12-year-old tomboy with dreams of becoming an inventor and famous musician; by the end, she’s almost 14 and leaving school to work at Woolworth’s so that she can help her struggling family. McCullers poignantly captures the disjunction between a pubescent girl’s rapid physical growth and the simultaneous restrictions society puts on her future. But she also describes Mick moving her big ideas to the “inside room” of her mind—they aren’t gone, they’re just more private. And in the end, Mick’s still connected to that earlier expressive dreamer: “Maybe it would be true about the piano,” she thinks, as she saves a few dollars each week toward buying one, “and turn out O.K.”

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

“Why is the measure of love loss?” This question drives Winterson’s memoir about growing up with an abusive adoptive mother, searching for her past, and making her future. The elder Winterson locks Jeannette outside in the winter and forbids all books except for the Bible. When she discovers that 14-year-old Jeanette is sleeping with her girlfriend, she has a Pentecostal minister force her daughter through three brutal (and unsuccessful) days of conversion therapy. Eventually, Jeanette saves herself by escaping into fiction. She works her way through every work of literature, A-Z, in her local library; and, after Mrs. Winterson evicts her at 16, gets herself into Oxford where she becomes a fiction writer. Here, she writes about how stories give words to those who have been silenced: “We get our language back through the language of others.” Fiction “isn’t a hiding place. It’s a finding place.”

The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon by Stephen King

Trisha isn’t a teenager (she’s “nine going on ten”), but she quickly starts thinking like one when she gets lost on the Appalachian Trail for nine days: During that time, she goes from being “the invisible girl” trying to glue the broken parts of her divorced family together to a self-reliant survivor. King focuses on Trisha’s mental gymnastics as she staves off the “no-brain roar of terror” with wilderness lessons she’s learned in science class and Little House on the Prairie. The only supernatural horrors are the ones she hallucinates, but she’s able to mute them with the intentional powers of her imagination: She conjures her favorite Red Sox player, pitcher Tim Gordon, to walk alongside her and offer advice on how to establish dominance over the opposing player. She channels the “ice water in his veins,” and his stance and decisive throw as she battles one last predator.

The Blazing World by Margaret Cavendish

Published in 1666, Cavendish’s Blazing World is one of the first examples of science fiction. It begins when a young lady, kidnapped by a lecherous merchant, washes up on the shore of a strange new world after the crew freezes to death. The Emperor grants her absolute power, which she uses to create new, female-friendly laws and customs. She also summons her animal-human hybrid subjects to debate their observations of the natural world with her. Cavendish, the first woman granted a visit to the exclusive Royal Society (a scientific academy), was later mocked by member Samuel Pepys: “I did not hear her say any thing that was worth hearing.” No wonder she turned to utopian fiction to find her inner girl boss. “I have made a world of my own,” she tells her readers, “for which no body, I hope, will blame me, since it is in everyone’s power to do the like.”

Fat Ham by James Ijames

Ijames transports Shakespeare’s Hamlet to a southern backyard BBQ in his hilarious, Pulitzer Prize-winning play. He reimagines all of the young characters as queer and Black, including Opal/Ophelia (who loves girls and wants to run a shooting range), and Juicy/Hamlet. Opal speaks for them both when she says, “we on the verge of gaining our powers but there’s something that’s like holding us back.” She’s the one who imagines a different future for Juicy where he doesn’t have to become the hard, avenging killer his father’s ghost wants him to be, or feel badly about the “softness” that his stepfather relentlessly bullies him about: “What he thinks is your weakness gonna save you Juicy.” But Opal’s also looking out for herself. Rather than go mad or drown, she refuses to enable the tragic ending that Shakespeare first staged. In Fat Ham’s jubilant climax, she announces: “I ain’t dying for nobody.”

Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng

Ng imagines a not-too-distant American dystopia where children are taken from their parents to “protect” them from unpatriotic ideas—namely, challenges to the anti-Asian narrative the government has manufactured to justify its authoritarian takeover. The main character, Bird, hasn’t seen his Chinese-American mom for years: rather than risk her son being “re-placed,” she disappears. He’s almost forgotten her when he meets Sadie, a 13-year-old who’s been taken from her family and bounced between foster homes. She’s a fearless truth seeker, asking the teachers where all the missing books are and secretly researching the history of Bird’s mom. When she discovers that her parents have moved with no forwarding address, she runs away and gets herself to New York City, where she helps reunite Bird with his mother. By the end, she still hasn’t found her parents, but she won’t stop searching for them, or for “a way out of all this.”

The Power by Naomi Alderman

What would happen if girls had all the power? Naomi Alderman brings this thought experiment to life by imagining an alternate history of the world: Across the globe, adolescent girls suddenly develop the ability to shoot deadly electricity through their fingertips and to awaken it in the “skeins” of adult women. Initially, the results are exhilarating: females from Riyadh to Moldova remake the world by toppling tyrants and killing sex-traffickers. The novel’s teenage protagonists also use the Power to fight their male oppressors: Allie kills her sexually abusive foster father, and Roxy executes the man who killed her mother. But then Allie, like matriarchs around the world, starts rewriting scripture and law to justify oppressing males. It isn’t until Roxy’s skein is cut out and stolen that she realizes the corruptive effects of power on the mind, and the toll it takes on humanity, regardless of who wields it.

The post 7 Literary Characters Who Break the “Teen Girl” Trope appeared first on Electric Literature.

Bookshelves are full of stories featuring characters that stumble through self-sabotage. Literature thrives on readers’ rooted interest in such flawed heroes and anti-heroes. My upcoming linked short story collection, Hands, features a main character, Hans, a blue-collar Indian immigrant seeking shortcuts and working odd jobs to make ends meet. Ultimately, when he gets in the way of his own success, Hans blames everyone but himself for his misfortune: The bullies at school; his best friend Kanti; an Indian girlfriend who isn’t Indian enough for him; and his sister’s endless nagging and superstition. Hans’s immigrant journey doesn’t crystallize into the American Dream because of his own misgivings, ill-timed decisions, and crooked thinking—but he doesn’t believe that. Everyone else is always to blame. When there’s nowhere left to point his finger at, does he finally point it toward himself? Negative. There are always customers who don’t tip enough on his pizza deliveries. 

The following reading list gathers stories of characters who can’t get out of their own way. These characters are both the aggressors and victims of their circumstances. They are hard to love, but it’s still painful to read about their collapses. In the end, readers are left feeling queasy, hoping for the best while realizing that the worst is inevitable.

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson

I don’t know if I’d be a writer without Denis Johnson. There’s no Hans without Fuckhead. These loosely linked stories explore the blue-collar underbelly of desperate labor—all clouded in intoxication and the search for the next high. Fuckhead and his cast of acquaintances stumble through odd jobs, petty theft, and toxic relationships. The characters consider honesty, but ultimately reject it in favor of shortcuts and a quick buck. Drugs and the pursuit of drugs are often the crux of Fuckhead’s self-sabotage. As he hunts for the next high, Fuckhead and his grab bag of friends end each story in more trouble than they began with. The collection’s brevity makes its complexity that much more astounding. How can so few words reveal so much of who we are when the odds are stacked against us and there appears to be no way out?

Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi

The prospect of madness smothers every page of Doshi’s novel as Antara attempts to care for her ailing mother, Tara, suffering from dementia. Part mother-daughter drama, part psychological thriller, Burnt Sugar turns the mirror on readers and asks: who do you believe? Antara’s self-doubt stunts her ability to care for her mother. She is caged by the paralysis of her own thoughts. She questions her mother’s diagnosis, re-writes her childhood, and ultimately is unsure about who is really losing their mind. I’ve gifted this book too many times to count. It’s the most important book on Indian motherhood that I’ve ever read.

People from Bloomington by Budi Darma

Obsessive tendencies in Darma’s comedic collection drive characters to absurd behavior and trap them in their circumstances. In “Yorrick,” a man spits and pisses on his roommate’s clothes so he will stop leaving them on the bathroom floor. In “The Family M,” the first-person narrator’s car gets scratched and he becomes single-mindedly focused on getting revenge on the kid who he thinks damaged his car. The narrator in “The Old Man With No Name” literally becomes obsessed with an old man in an apartment complex and starts stalking him. These seven stories are told in first-person and feature obsessive narrators who are willingly derailed by the smallest details of everyday life.  

Somebody Loves You by Mona Arshi

Somebody Loves You centers on Ruby, a teenager who stops speaking and becomes a self-proclaimed “expert in the art of solitude and quietness.” Ruby and her older sister, Rania, are navigating adolescence without their mother after she suffers a mental breakdown. Like Burnt Sugar, the Indian mother plays a central role in the trauma on the page. However, unlike the books on this list, Ruby’s imprisonment—embodied by her choice not to speak—is a conscious decision and an attempt to free herself from her past troubles rather than drowning in them. The result is a short, challenging, and violent novel that will force the reader to grapple with the imagined and actual threats in the world. 

Whiteout Conditions by Tariq Shah

The setup: Ant returns home to Chicago to attend the funeral of his friend’s cousin, who was killed by a neighborhood dog. It’s a complicated setup that is enriched by childhood memories sprinkled throughout the short novel. All Whiteout Conditions’s characters are drunk, high, and unhinged as they mourn the sudden loss in their family. But it’s not Ant’s family. So what is he even doing there? Ant’s unexpected and often unwanted arrival causes drug-induced chaos at the funeral as a family tries to move forward while Ant pulls them back and drowns them in the past. But of course, Ant doesn’t realize his own part in the oxy-laced toxicity of this emotionally and physically violent novel.

Oksana, Behave! by Maria Kuznetsova

Oksana is selfish and self-destructive. She sleeps with a married man at her grandmother’s funeral. She drinks a lot and is generally unlikeable. But she’s funny. Is that enough? It is in Oksana, Behave!, which follows a family’s immigration journey to the United States through Oksana’s engaging and brutally honest perspective. She recalls the story of her family moving from Kiev to Florida, and describes her education in middle and high school, college, and then graduate school. The immigrant themes of losing social status, language, and homeland are integrated within this coming-of-age story. Oksana’s comedic charm makes her likeable and hateable at the same time. Ultimately, her hurtful antics induce a guilty laugh—even though she should know better.

Before the End, After the Beginning by Dagoberto Gilb

The characters in Gilb’s collection are stuck in the mud and not trying very hard to get out. They want the reader to believe that they’re doing their best, but their actions suggest otherwise. In “The Last Time I Saw Junior,” the narrator finds himself in a compromised situation, as usual, chasing the next high with an old friend in an obscure location, which is only aggravated when he slips into a drug-induced rage. In “Blessing,” a character drives hours north from El Paso to visit his ex-girlfriend who is now married with a baby. He stays in her house, falls into the same patterns that led to their breakup, and departs as lost and broken as when he arrived for the visit. Gilb’s characters hope for the best while acting on their cheap and easy desires. Their failures are internal, but the blame always lies “outside their control.”

The post 7 Books Featuring Self-Sabotaging Characters appeared first on Electric Literature.

Then, I didn’t have the language to describe what I was feeling: the remoteness and separation from the larger world; the way that anyone who left and stayed away was otherized—as if wanting to get away from a county with a high teen pregnancy rate and a low per capita income was the fault of the leaver; the sense of tension that is often present in rural areas, in that the pastoral beauty is a scrim over a hard way of living. Books fulfilled a desire for connection with the larger world, and often helped articulate another tension: the push and pull between isolation and community. 

My fifth book, The Last Supper, looks at these themes I’m perennially obsessed with—the impact of loneliness and seclusion, the human need for companionship, the necessity of finding people with whom we have commonality—and views them through the lens of my protagonist Amanda, a mother of two young children who is searching for more creative and economic agency in her life. It’s a novel for anyone who cares about how we build relationships and the ways that expectations around how family structures are “supposed” to work often impede our own happiness. 

In the spirit of looking for and finding community, here are eight books that examine this idea from different perspectives. Whether that is tight-knit friend groups who weather changes in life or themes of reconciling with the dead, the books on this list illustrate the complexity of finding our place in the world, all while showing that it really is possible.

The In-Betweens by Davon Loeb

In this memoir, Loeb writes about growing up biracial, with Black family roots in Alabama and white Jewish family roots in Long Island. Growing up Black and Jewish in the predominantly white suburbs of New Jersey engenders a sense of outsiderness in Loeb. He has a complicated relationship to family and race. Yet, he also writes of finding one’s way through first loves, early jobs, and a network of collaborators—the experiences and people who shape our lives. Some memoirs tell. Others explain. Loeb is the latter, illuminated. 

Ideas of Heaven by Joan Silber 

A penultimate chronicle of life, Silber’s Ideas of Heaven beautifully deploys hindsight, and each of these linked stories speaks to the power of connection. There’s a religious undercurrent in this book, written more as a way to link communities than to lionize any particular faith. Silber writes equally as well about fitting together as she does about being in opposition, because her stories center people, showing how far we will go for those we love.

White Horse by Erika T. Wurth 

This Indigenous horror novel follows Kari, who finds a connection to her mother’s ghost through an old family bracelet and is subsequently haunted by visions of people who have passed over, along with even more terrifying specters. At its heart, however, White Horse is about relationships, reconciling with family, the impact of chosen family, and the wide constellation of what community can mean: Sometimes it’s the drinking crew at a bar, sometimes it’s tribal aunties, but it’s always critical. 

These Impossible Things by Salma El-Wardany 

Centering on female friendships, These Impossible Things shows how deep bonds can be compromised, and how growing up and growing older can contextually change how we feel about the people we used to always reach out to first. It follows three Muslim women who met at school and are now living in London, figuring out their paths. Sometimes their choices strain the friendship, and there is constant tension between cultural expectations and being a 20-something in the city. This book addresses serious topics, but it also has a lightness to it, and it’s deeply relatable to anyone who has had decade-spanning friendships.

Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen 

This is a book that could have just as easily been called a speculative memoir as a novel. Jen writes toward an understanding of a fraught relationship with the narrator’s mother, who speaks from beyond the grave; and the narrator begins to understand how her mother was trapped between cultures, carried deep trauma, and was often misunderstood. It’s intimate and compulsively readable. Jen takes a complex family dynamic, transforms it into an intergenerational saga, distills it back into a love letter, and in doing so, forges a new bond.

Hello Wife by Lisa K Friedman

Set squarely at the intersection of middle-age regret and the American opioid crises, the setup alone of Hello Wife is poised to create tension. When Charlotte gets engaged to Jimbo, an unemployed addict she met at 7-Eleven, she’s 49 years old and ready for love. Charlotte’s family doesn’t agree that this is the way to do it. Yet, while it becomes quite clear and quite quickly that this is not a redemption story, the longing for companionship is palpable. Written with a delightful wryness.

Clutch by Emily Nemens

Clutch (which I have written about before) follows a group of five tight-knit friends, all turning 40. In writing everything from fertility treatments, looming divorces, political ambitions, tech bros, and addiction, Nemens imbues the quintet with side-alliances and a certain kind of girl-drama. Yet, even when there is conflict, sisterhood always encircles the women. It’s a satisfying, juicy-plot read with an unbreakable bond at the core. 

Nadezhda in the Dark by Yelena Moskovich 

Partners living in Berlin after having fled the Soviet Union as children—one from Ukraine and one from Russia—are in their apartment, not speaking on a long night. In this narrative in verse, there’s a sense of rootlessness for both women. Between Nadezhda and her unnamed partner, history surfaces and hurt surfaces. Both women process what it means to have lost a homeland. The narrator tries to understand what it means to love Nadezhda. As a writer, Moskovich places that ache the most, and she does it without apology and with a present lyricism that often leads her characters to a place of agency. 

The post 8 Books About Characters Seeking Community and Connection appeared first on Electric Literature.

In the world of prose, I think of Fran Ross’s Oreo, so original, hilarious, and ecstatic—a formally ingenious book. And what about Annie Dillard’s wild inventions in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek or Holy the Firm? She ended up with a university teaching post, but I can’t imagine either of these works emerging as a master’s thesis. Outside the United States, J. A. Baker’s The Peregrine comes to mind, too, evoking a totalizing fascination with falcons in diaristic prose that is unbearably beautiful. Each of these books is sui generis, authored by singular minds transfiguring literary and cultural history without heeding predominant tastes or trends. 

In the world of poetry, I’ve especially struggled to locate writers without MFAs, with a few exceptions like Louise Glück and Danez Smith, different generations but both luminaries to me. It’s taken years—some posting on social media and scouring author bios—but I’ve found a few MFA-less contemporary poets whose expansive imaginations have produced exciting, inventive books. While each writer is distinct, their taste, sensibility, and allegiances are manifold. No one advises them where to go, so they go everywhere. 

Whitman. Cannonball. Puebla. by Rodrigo Toscano

This book has a theatrical sweep, its poems reading like monologues and dialogues that think and revise and name and trouble naming itself. Toscano talks through economy, empire, and the multifarious registers of language, laboring—this being a special focus of his—to include and undermine theoretical jargon that can ally and alienate. Toscano’s mind is exciting and expansive. But where his poetry most impresses and surprises is at the hyper-local level of words, specifically the interjections like um, yeah, ugh, oh, etc. that juxtapose the book’s philosophical rigor, creating funny, insightful, and tonally rich poems.

Common Disaster by M. Cynthia Cheung

Some of Cheung’s most compelling poems are ghazals, and the collection itself begins to resemble a radif, a word repeating at the end of lines. “Exile” is one such word, accruing conflicting meanings. Exile is place, body, history. Nothing is one thing. The poet herself is physician, dreamer, historian, mother, wife. The self, like the radif, repeats—altered slightly each time. Common Disaster is the perfect title then. Disaster may be common—in more than one sense of the word—but as the collection demonstrates, it is not endured equally. Cheung is a musician: often brutal subjects cast in lucid lines, beauty rendered without consolation. The pandemic, hospital rooms, the Silk Road—each becomes a site where history and intimacy converge. If a person is a crossing of multiple histories, few poets trace that crossing with such immediacy and tenderness.

My Heresies by Alina Stefanescu

I don’t think you’ll find a more provocative cover. Bring it with you to your local coffee shop, DMV, or even to church. Really, it will provoke. Her poems traverse so many subjects, histories, obsessions, questions, antecedents, epigraphs, forms, and more—we have cameos from Homer to László Földényi to Maximus the Confessor. These poems are like a strange heretical religion: They don’t just focus on the unattended moment, which poetry can be so good at, but they also create assemblages that mystify. I love these poems. You are dreaming with a poet who seems limitless in her imagination.

Frame Inside a Frame by Daniel Lassell

Lassell builds an architecture wherein poems work individually and astonish as a collection. The poet works and reworks what a frame can signify. Sometimes, frames include and exclude the past, and a subject in one poem will be transfigured in another, a frame inside a frame. Lassell thinks through so many spatial possibilities in a world disordered and overwhelmed by information and content. However, the poet doesn’t sentimentalize unity. The synecdochal texts question wholeness and stability, especially through a series of erasure poems, “The Temple of Salt,” that reimagine linguistic and theological possibilities in Genesis. These erasures are some of the finest poems I’ve read this year.

Animal Unfit by Megan Nichols

Sometimes, as they say, art does aspire to the condition of music. Here is such a book. These poems are marvels of the everyday in the Ozarks. The project is living, attending to the vicissitudes of motherhood and the fraught pleasures of desire. A careful, devoted observer, Nichols writes poems filled with unruly questions that forego tempting and easy resolutions. For her child, whose father is no longer around, she offers to “be your trellis, at best.” These are poems about wildness—the feral exterior and volatile interior. 

Natural History by Brandon Kilbourne

No exhibit is a neutral representation of knowledge. In natural history museums, for instance, dioramas can occlude the vexed entanglement between science and empire. Kilbourne, a longtime research biologist, complicates the historical production and transfer of knowledge—history isn’t partitioned with great and noble scientific inquiry on one side and racist colonial plundering on the other. Natural History makes clear that what we know cannot be divested from how we have come to know. Intricate in design and sonorous, the poems startle both in erudition and cadence. Whether he writes about himself or a recipe, Kilbourne situates the subject—the poems often open with periodic sentences so that the subject doesn’t appear neutral or unburdened by history. The effect Kilbourne achieves could only arise through this unexpected but necessary reciprocity of science and poetry.

Transit by David Baker

Some say if you write long enough, you keep writing and rewriting the same poem. Nature poets, in particular, can vanish into the landscape, protected by flora and fauna nomenclature. However, Baker writes inimitably beautiful poems about the natural world that make me rethink what the “natural world” even is. What fascinates me is how he thinks through subjects, with heterogeneous methodologies and vocabularies and histories. In one poem, “Oikos,” the poet ruminates his way through vexed conceptions of home and hospitality, of ethics, the form of the poem restive: spacious in some sections, controlled and hymnal in others. The language is conversational, full of puns, but also learned, melodic—the poet attempts to make a dwelling for his beloveds while remaining aware of the terrors inextricable to that process. 

The post 7 Innovative Collections From Poets Without MFAs appeared first on Electric Literature.

Speculative fiction has been having a moment for a while, and in many works—including the ones on this list—there is also a deep current of loss and isolation. And ghosts. What’s interesting to me, just as how the Frankenstein retellings came from really different writers, is the way the through lines in books from this season cross generations, genres, and perspectives. The story collections from Patricia Henley and Tayyba Kanwal, whose debuts have nearly three decades of distance between them, have a lot more in common than the jacket copy would suggest. Similarly, ire’ne lara silva and Wesley Brown capture a kind of familial longing, though Brown’s realism is literary (in the genre sense) and silva’s is magical. 

My editor said he’s starting to see a lot of Icarus metaphors, but what I’m seeing is writers using narrative to try and articulate our contemporary moment, even if their work is set in the 14^th Century, like Lauren C. Johnson. None of these books fly too close to the sun, but all take that same soaring ambition. 

Tin House: Clutch by Emily Nemens

A group of five college friends take a trip to Palm Springs, the first time they’ve all been together in years. Careers, children, marriages, and aging parents make connecting in person difficult, even though they always keep up with each other in the group chat. Yet, as elder millennials, the fourth decade of their lives is about to become a flash point: Changes are coming for each of the women. Their renewed closeness creates a scaffolding they all hold on to, but it also reminds them of the times they were less supportive, wrapped up in their own concerns. Clutch is a novel that explores the complexity and nuance of long female friendships, and Nemens writes this dynamic with perfect pitch. The only reason to put this engrossing novel down is to text your bestie.

Regal House: A Woman in Pink by Megan A. Schikora

After being entwined in a decade-and-a-half long relationship, the nameless woman in Schikora’s novel and Dutch, the charismatic leading man in her idea of a love story, ultimately part. Though they were never fully honest with each other as a couple, hiding the pieces of their past lives dealing with substance abuse and disordered eating, the protagonist of the novel cannot let Dutch go. Even when he marries, she pines for him and what they could have been, to the point that she considers Dutch’s wife the “other woman.” The protagonist tracks her relationship with Dutch along with another love story, that of June Carter and Johnny Cash. A Woman in Pink chronicles the relatable if heartbreaking reality that love is not always enough to make a partnership work, and takes a hard look at what healing actually means. 

Cornerstone Press: Apple & Palm by Patricia Henley

In the town of Whistle Pig, people are living their lives. Characters recur in Patricia Henley’s latest. For example, Jill Zebrak, who in one story regularly retrieves her elderly father from the local casino and mildly tolerates his lover who is closer in age to her than him, appears in another story where she takes in two young girls after their parents die in a murder-suicide. Yet Henley’s collection is not bleak: There is a vibrant artist colony in Whistle Pig, amorous octogenarians, and a true sense of community. What Henley does best is describe how small-town life has both a frustrating insularity and inescapable points of connection. Apple & Palm looks at the ways we live and the choices we make not only for our own survival, but also for the survival of the people who surround us. 

Black Lawrence Press: Talking with Boys by Tayyba Kanwal

A domestic worker trapped in a Dubai household of extraordinary wealth schemes for her and the other workers to get out; a Houston family’s babysitter lands a spot on a reality show about nannies, and they attempt to use this to catapult their own children to fame; in Lahore, a privileged woman seeks her own economic agency, only to be rebuked by her husband, all while a gifted bracelet from her son—meant to convey his prosperity—circles her wrist like a handcuff. In Pakistan, and in the Pakistani diaspora, Kanwal’s characters are pushing against customs and expectations, or angling for power and dominance. The stories are written with attention to an emotional center. It’s not always clear who the villain is, and that’s the point in these heartfelt and beautifully textured stories.

Dzanc Books: The Shipikisha Club by Mubanga Kalimamukwento

In this multi-generational novel, the higher price that women pay, from action to silence, is cracked open. Sali, the only child of an evangelical family, stands trial for the murder of her husband. Fourteen years earlier, she was living in her family’s home and was pregnant by a married man. After his accidental death, she is wedded to a local police officer who swears to raise the child as his own. Yet, while Sali and her husband go on to have two more children, they struggle with money and marital fidelity. The murder trial makes the Zambian national headlines, and Sali’s 15-year-old daughter Ntashé has to reconcile what the newspapers print and what she hears in the courts against what she knows of her mother. Sali’s own mother must do the same. Gripping.

University of New Mexico Press: something out there in the distance by Grant Faulkner and Gail Butensky

In this hybrid work, photographs of Joshua trees, Ferris wheels, and old motels are companions to the story of Dawn and Johnny, who are on a road trip across the American West. Dawn, a photographer, has cancer. Johnny, the driver, navigates highways and red dirt roads, and drives onto a golf course to flip a donut. The effect is that of chronology by postcard, narrative through mile-markers. The book captures the desolate beauty of both the desert plains and mountains, punctuated by tiny, dying towns. something out there in the distance is a slim volume containing a deep emotional weight. 

Arte Público Press: the light of your body by ire’ne lara silva

After a brush with death, Antonio encounters his first love, a man who has passed over and is caring in the afterlife for Antonio’s child who did not survive to infancy; Emma Elisa grows marigolds all season to host an elaborate Día de los Muertos party, where her community builds altars and considers the past; a spirit of death inhabits a tattooed body, falls in love with a hospice nurse, and runs a taco truck with vegan options. In these loosely linked stories, the veil between the dead and the living is a mere shimmer. The collection speaks to erotic desire, brings myth into reality, confronts generational trauma, and addresses colonialism all in stunning, gorgeous prose. The beauty in how silva writes speaks to our complicated histories and yearning bodies. 

Rescue Press: Lonesome Ballroom by Madeline McDonnell

Betty is a young woman with a famous feminist mother best known for executing a re-imagining of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, and that shadow hangs over Betty just as an elaborate fresco. As Betty experiences the messy part of early adulthood when friendships and relationships change, her childhood begins to feel more distant. In conversation with a server at Lonesome Ballroom, at happy hours with her grandmother, or wading through the discourse of her marriage, Betty cannot quite find her footing. She’s smart, she’s educated, but she also doesn’t have a clear sense of herself. McDonnell’s Lonesome Ballroom expertly wrestles with questions of third-wave feminism and familial inheritance, all while perfectly capturing the anxieties of the turn of the 21^st century. A wild—and for women of a particular generation, highly relatable—ride. 

McSweeney’s: Looking for Frank Wills by Wesley Brown

The Watergate scandal of 1972 is embedded in the American consciousness, but less remembered is Frank Wills, then a young man who had worked his way up to a security guard at the Watergate complex. On June 17^th, he noticed that locks to one of the office suites had been tampered with and called the police, ultimately bringing down the Nixon presidency. In this short novel, Wesley Brown blends the true story of Wills with the fictionalized account of Wayne Beasley, a Black Korean war vet who runs a family barbershop in Savannah and recounts his memories of Wills as a child, a young adult, and then a man at the center of major historical event. The novel emerges as a conversation between generations that asks questions about race, politics, war, and family. Looking for Frank Wills is a powerful retelling of Wills’s story. 

7.13 Books: Sunset at Lion Rock by Matthew Wong Foreman

Born to a Chinese mother and a British father, Eric is out of place at school in Hong Kong and called a “ghost” for his light-complexioned face. Eric is caught between different realities: should he speak English or Cantonese? How does he negotiate his separated parents’ different perspectives against his own experiences? How does he figure out who is against who he wants to be? Wong Foreman takes all of these questions and alchemizes them into an exploratory narrative that centers Eric and excavates family dynamics. There’s an epistolary element that brings the voices in closer, but the center is Eric and his struggles. A novel that’s as broad as it is heartfelt. 

Biblioasis: Every Time We Say Goodbye by Ivana Sajko, translated by Mima Simić

In the aftermath of a romantic breakup, a writer and journalist departs the apartment he shared with his partner, making all of the arrangements within ten days. On a train to Berlin, the narrator of Sajko’s novel reflects on his (and her) culpability for their parting while also ruminating on memories of his family, like his alcoholic father who died alone and his mother who made a harrowing escape from his father’s violence. A compressed book, every sentence sings with emotional resonance and is imbued with the protagonist’s regret. Every Time We Say Goodbye is a master class in both economy of language and expansiveness of feeling.

SFWP: The West Façade by Lauren C. Johnson

It’s 1348 in Paris, on the west façade of Notre Dame, and the statue of Sainte Geneviève has been gifted an orange by a woman who climbs the wall to reach her. Though the forms that adorn and guard the cathedral look still to passerby, they’re conscious beings who can loose themselves from their niches for one night each moon cycle and explore the city, its people, and its pleasures. Geneviève wants more than one night monthly, and despite the cautioning she is given, isn’t so interested in the rules after she’s tasted the orange. The West Façade draws on everything from Eve’s eating of the apple to Cinderella needing to return before midnight to questions about what consciousness and sentience means—all the more a salient line of inquiry in the age of AI. Johnson takes the art of another era and contemporizes it to a compelling, original effect. 

Guernica Editions: Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive by Alison Gadsby

In this linked collection of speculative fiction, an accountant who is learning to swim is interrogated by her humanoid companion; a woman is unanchored in time and cannot remember giving birth to her daughter or even who she is; and in the title story, a couple argues incessantly and from such deep unhappiness the woman dreams hopefully of contracting a fatal tumor. Gadsby’s stories have simmering resentment, the cruelty of children, and the terror of never belonging as characters right alongside her unhappy people, threaded together with recurring themes. The effect is a glittering collection with high emotional tension. 

Tin House: The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts by Kim Fu

The adulthood experience of purchasing a first home becomes something much more pronounced for Eleanor Fan. As she grew up, her mother, Lele, helped her with everything—even into adulthood—but after Lele’s death, Eleanor is left without her guidance and ultimately buys a property that’s less of a home and more of a sodden cage. As the Pacific Northwest rain continues to fall, Eleanor must reckon with both the absence of her mother’s strong force in her life, and the appearance of a new force: ghosts who speak to her. Fu’s novel shows the impact of isolation on a young woman consumed by grief, as the story unfolds with increasing intensity. A literary page-turner. 

Palimpsest Press: The Unravelling of Ou by Hollay Ghadery

The perspective in The Unravelling of Ou belies the seriousness of the book: The narrative is told from the viewpoint of a sock-puppet named Ecology Paul. Of course, Ecology Paul must be puppeted by someone, and that’s Minoo, who is struggling with feelings of isolation. The sock-puppet speaks less to whimsy and more to how desperately people need to be seen and listened to, and how deeply feelings of shame are buried. Yet while the sock puppet is a source of comfort to Minoo, her adult daughter is not having it, and Minoo must work through her own feelings in order to save the relationship. Ghadery takes a silly premise and transforms it into a captivating, layered story. A feat of imagination and execution. 

The post 15 Must-Read Small Press Books of Spring 2026 appeared first on Electric Literature.

My book, Troika, chronicles a three-day road trip to California’s Central Coast. In the car: me, my 77-year-old mother, and my 22-year-old daughter. We drive 250 miles south to Solvang, a quaint Danish town made famous by the 2004 film Sideways, meander through the Santa Ynez Valley, stop at an ostrich farm, visit a stunning outdoor light installation in Paso Robles, bicker, binge-watch the second season of The White Lotus, and embark on a quest for the best latte art. It’s a modest journey—three women, three days, an unambitious itinerary—but along the way, Troika explores the complicated interior landscapes of myth, migration, and memory, braiding together echoes of the Odyssey, a legacy of loss, and a family history of fleeing from monsters, both real and imagined.

The nine books on this list undertake similarly circumscribed journeys: across a parlor, through a single unruly sentence, back into a childhood bedroom. Their protagonists are daughters, mothers, wives, caretakers, and strivers—women who struggle with the weight of inheritance and expectation, confront and name their own desires, and navigate uncharted interior terrain. But even when hemmed in by economic exigency, physical disability, or cultural constraints, these protagonists show us that nothing is more heroic than a consciousness finding a way forward on its own terms.

Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann

Over the course of a single, breathless, looping sentence that runs for a thousand pages, the unnamed narrator muses about her failed first marriage, her happy second marriage, her four children, her health, her health insurance, money, her part-time job baking pies, her earlier job as an untenured history professor, the sites of Native American massacres near the small Ohio town where she lives with her family, GRWM routines, climate change, internet headlines, and the thrumming violence just beneath the surface of American life. We may not know her name, but she contains multitudes, and by the end of the novel, she feels like a close friend.

Washington Square by Henry James

Catherine Sloper’s beautiful, clever mother died in childbirth, and Catherine—who grows up to be neither clever nor beautiful—is left in the care of her meddlesome older aunt and her exacting, acerbic father, a well-regarded doctor who believes that “you are good for nothing if you aren’t clever.” What’s a girl to do, especially if she’s stuck in her father’s house with no marriage prospects? If you’re Catherine, you endure a broken heart, quietly defy your controlling father, take up needlepoint, find your backbone and your voice, and realize that your small-seeming life may not be so small after all—especially if you live it on your terms…

Scavengers by Kathleen Boland

A mother and daughter embark on a treasure hunt in the Utah desert. They are carrying an unreliable map, a lifetime of resentments and regrets, and not enough sunscreen. The mother, Christy, is erratic and irresponsible; the daughter, Bea (short for Beautiful), seeks order in numbers and weather patterns. Their search for treasure loops and meanders, but much of the narrative drama takes place in the cramped spaces of memory, text exchanges, and snatches of conversation. A fraught, uneasy tenderness slowly builds between the two women as they chart an unexpected path back to each other.

Goodbye, Vitamin by Rachel Khong

Ruth’s fiancé has dumped her for another woman (“I loosened the jar lid,” she notes, “so someone else could open him”). Her father, who has Alzheimer’s, is flinging his pants and shirts into trees. Ruth returns to her childhood home, where she cooks cruciferous vegetables (her father calls them “crucified vegetables”) and jellyfish, which are supposed to stave off cognitive decline, accompanies her parents on walks to the park, and searches for projects that spark her father’s interest. The novel’s modest scale—meals prepared, notes left on the refrigerator, snatches of dialogue overheard in the street—belies its immense affection, wry hilarity, and attentive intelligence.

A Cup of Water Under My Bed by Daisy Hernández

Daisy Hernández is five when she begins learning English—a language that sounds like “marbles in the mouth”—and for years afterward, the hurt of being the first to leave her Cuban-Colombian family for another language lingers. Her fluency puts her at a remove from the people she loves most; so does identifying as bisexual and speaking out in a culture that traditionally values stoicism and silence. But no matter how far she ventures, writing allows her to remain close to home; writing, she says, “is how I leave my family and how I take them with me.”

All Fours by Miranda July

A self-described semi-famous artist sets out on a cross-country drive, but 20 minutes into her trip, she checks into a small-town motel. There, she spends an exorbitant amount of money redecorating the motel room, engages in an unconsummated affair, and dreads the “estrogen cliff” that will send her hurtling into the jaws of menopause. The novel is polarizing—readers have dismissed the protagonist as self-indulgent and unlikable and cringed at her no-holds-barred frankness—but I was brought to tears by her fearless willingness to explore the darkest recesses of her psyche and the rich intimacy of female friendships that undergird the novel.

The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

Odysseus’s loyal wife, Penelope, spends most of The Odyssey weaving, waiting, and weeping. Now that she’s dead, she’s ready to drop some truth bombs from the underworld. She is no longer willing to bite her tongue, to keep the right doors closed and go to sleep during the rampages. She’s sardonic and angry. She regrets not standing up for the maids Odysseus and Telemachus slaughtered when Odysseus returned to Ithaca, but it’s too late; their voices haunt her story, for the maids understand better than anyone the steep cost of keeping the home fires burning.

We Are Never Meeting in Real Life. by Samantha Irby

Why go outside when you can hang out in your apartment with the internet, the TV, and your garbagemonster cat? Samantha Irby sees no reason for it. Her bowels are irritable, her arthritis is flaring, the dating scene is “fucking dire,” and her job skills are limited to—in her words—surly phone answering, playing the race card, and eating other people’s lunches in the break room. Also, her mind is a “never-ending series of shame spirals” leavened with depression and anxiety, which is why she’s staying home in her day pajamas, eating the snacks she ordered online, and spinning the dross of daily life into gold.

Priestdaddy by Patricia Lockwood

Imagine your father (who, incidentally, spent your college tuition on a guitar that once belonged to Paul McCartney) is one of a handful of non-celibate Roman Catholic priests in the world. You are nothing like him. You write poetry. On the internet, which has just become a thing, you meet another poet in a poetry chat room, and the two of you marry (at 19!)) and move to Savannah. You’re poor and happy, until a catastrophe forces you and your husband to move back into your father’s house, which in this case also happens to be the house of God. Lockwood’s main instrument of resistance—her profane, poetic, loose-limbed, exquisitely unhinged voice—punctures the domestic claustrophobia and creates its own sacred spaces.

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Over four years, I had the privilege of reading and translating Areej Gamal’s Sawiris Prize-winning novel Mariam, It’s Arwa. The book, emphatically and sublimely female, is about a multiplicity of revolutions, the most literal of them appearing in its frame plot, during the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square and Cairo’s streets. The novel spans generations of women: the mother who falls in love across class and religion and risks everything to follow her heart; the daughter who leaves an unhappy home and emigrates to Germany to find herself; the abused grandmother who has internalized the idea that a woman is nothing if she doesn’t bear a son; and the mother who nearly dies in her quest to make that dream a reality. And of course, the two main characters’ love is its own revolution—a remaking of the world as a more inclusive place in spite of itself, even if their world is one small apartment on Champollion Street. It’s my favorite kind of book: a book by a woman about women taking their lives into their own hands. One that centers women at the forefront of revolution/war and social change. 

While my definition of “revolutionary” here is broad—encompassing societal revolution and personal rebellions against tradition—I admit that war is at the forefront of my mind. As I’m writing this, the normal city sounds in Amman, Jordan, where I am, are interspersed with emergency sirens, occasionally fighter jets and explosions. The US and Israel are attacking Iran, which is attacking back, and we are war-adjacent. More or less safe—we hope—but affected, as is the entire region. It’s hard not to see echoes of this chaos appearing in some of the novels on this list. But when I look around, I’m grateful to see echoes of the heroines’ tenacity and resilience, as well. These novels have much to teach us about the importance of knowledge-gathering and memory, seeking out joy in the midst of crisis, and rejecting any entity that tries to write our stories for us.

Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El Saadawi, translated by Sherif Hetata

Nawal El Saadawi (1931-2021), the Egyptian writer, medical doctor, and psychologist, has often been compared to Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf—an outspoken feminist and activist whose writing had a dramatic impact on generations. Jailed under Sadat for “crimes against the state,” she wrote about authoritarianism, feminism, and capitalism, and Woman at Point Zero—what the British-Palestian writer and lawyer Selma Dabbagh calls a “small volume of fury”—is one of her seminal works. The main character, Firdaus, is in prison awaiting execution after killing a man. As she tells her story, it is difficult not to feel both anger and empathy. There are few points of hope in the book, in which money is the only source of autonomy for a woman and prostitution near-inevitable for one born without, yet it is through landmark novels like this one, with its fierce condemnation of patriarchal society, that change is possible. Pleasant? No. To say that the book needs a content warning would be an understatement. Important? Incredibly.

The Granada Trilogy by Radwa Ashour, translated by Kay Heikkinen

I first read William Granara’s translation of Granada, the trilogy’s first book, as part of a book club, where members were heartbroken that the subsequent parts were untranslated. Now, for the first time, the whole trilogy is available in English. The story begins in 1492, when the Arab kingdom of Granada falls to the Christian Castilians, and the Moorish presence in Spain becomes unstable. The text follows a Muslim family as it tries to make sense of the forced conversions, book burnings, job loss, immigration, rebellion, and Inquisition until, one hundred years later, their descendants are deported en masse. The women in the book stand out, particularly Salima, a great lover of books and a healer, and Maryama, her sister-in-law, who is clever, defiant, and compassionate, a rallying point for the community in chaotic times. Women are at the core of this book, conserving knowledge and holding their families together.

Planet of Clay by Samar Yazbek, translated by Leri Price

Told in lyrical, often cinematic prose from the perspective of a neurodivergent young woman named Rima, Planet of Clay depicts the Syrian Civil War and the aftermath of the chemical attack and siege on Ghouta. Rima, who does not speak, spent much of her childhood in a school library and has a deep love of books and painting. We find her lost in her thoughts when the book opens, trapped in a cellar with only boxes of paper and a pen, recording her story as she runs out of food. The war has stripped her of all the people she loved, and she cannot grasp why. “We are toys made out of clay, small toys, quick to break and crumble,” she writes. Still, this careful storyteller sees beauty at times when others don’t look for it, using her imagination to make sense of and find light in a dark world.

A Calamity of Noble Houses by Amira Ghenim, translated by Miled Faiza and Karen McNeil

Set in 1930s Tunis, A Calamity of Noble Houses was shortlisted for the IPAF in 2021. It begins with Tunisian revolutionary Tahar Haddad, author of Our Women in the Shari’a and Society, and places her in the context of two upper-crust families, the conservative Ennaifers and the more progressive Rassaa family. Here, Haddad, a real historical figure from humble origins who was instrumental in shaping the future of women’s rights in Tunisia, falls in love with the young Zbaida Ali Rassaa, who becomes the wife of Mohsen Ennaifer. When dubious accusations of an affair surface, tragedy strikes. The novel decenters Haddad to tell the story of the two families as narrated by eleven different characters from disparate social classes who, together, paint a rich portrait of a nation in flux, spanning several decades.

Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh, translated by Sawad Hussain

In 1987, during the First Intifada, a curfew is imposed in a Nablus neighborhood, and three women are trapped inside the same house. Nuzha, its owner and daughter of a prostitute, is furious at society and the whispers that her mother was a spy for Israel. Sitt Zakia, a middle-aged midwife, uses faith as a barrier against the political violence surrounding her. And Samar, the optimist, is a university graduate studying how the Intifada has affected Palestinian women’s lives. Together, they hatch a plan to thwart Israeli soldiers’ effort to barricade the street. Like Mariam, It’s Arwa, this novel doesn’t gloss over the multiple fronts of the ongoing revolution. When it was published in 1990, the novel was criticized for daring to depict domestic violence on the part of Palestinian freedom fighters. But Khalifeh makes it clear that these women’s oppression is twofold: both Israeli Occupation and the patriarchy itself.

Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, translated by Elisabeth Jaquette

A finalist for the National Book Award and longlisted for the International Booker Prize, Minor Detail won the 2023 LiBeraturpreis, but the awards ceremony was indefinitely postponed in solidarity with Israel after the October 7 Hamas attacks—a move that drew criticism from numerous organizations. The novel is a haunting meditation on war and memory that includes two intertwined stories. The first begins in 1949, when an Israeli battalion massacres an encampment of Bedouins in the southern Negev and abducts a Palestinian teenager whom they rape, kill, and bury. The second is the story of a young woman from Ramallah, born twenty-five years to the day after this crime, who sets out to uncover more details about it, encountering obstacle after obstacle as she attempts to access archives that will give her information about her country’s past. This is knowledge-seeking as revolution at its best.

Blood Feast by Malika Moustadraf, translated by Alice Guthrie

Malika Moustadraf was a force of nature and an icon of feminism who passed away in 2006, at just 37 years old. A “rebel realist,” as she called herself, Moustadraf’s prose is so embodied that it often turns the stomach. It details what translator Alice Guthrie calls “an unflinching look at the worst traumas of the female experience in patriarchal society, shot through with wit, wordplay, and razor-sharp political commentary.” Her stories fearlessly take on abject poverty, religious hypocrisy, pimps and incels, a girl’s horrifying first period, cybersex, and the failure of the Moroccan medical system to help those in need. Moustadraf was maligned in her time due to her literary activism, and her two books had fallen out of print in Arabic at the time of her death; it’s thanks in large part to Guthrie’s tireless advocacy that her writing is now available again in both Arabic and English. 

The Story of Zahra by Hanan al-Shaykh, translated by Peter Ford

I bought my Arabic copy of this book for the cover art: a girl in a swing, her eyes closed, a daisy covering her mouth. Then I read about Zahra—“flower” in Arabic—a girl who yearns to be close to her mother, who, in turn, uses Zahra as a shield in her love affair. Originally published in 1980, this classic of the Lebanese Civil War is about a young woman seeking to establish her own identity, one who spends years escaping. First from an authoritarian father and disappointing mother to West Africa—where she has a miserable marriage—then back to war-torn Beirut, where she begins an affair with a sniper. The book tackles childhood trauma, assault, the complex emotional landscape of emigration, and the stigma surrounding female sexuality. Unlike Firdaus in Woman at Point Zero, Zahra experiences and embraces pleasure—a point of hope, if not ultimately of salvation.

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When we’re children, we’re thrust into a familial world whose history is opaque to us, and we have to figure out how to live in it. My own brother and I wandered side by side through this bewildering landscape, watching each other stumble over the rubble of our parents’ ambitions, each trying to be just like the other and trying to be the exact opposite. We could have helped each other more, is what I think now, if we hadn’t each been busy trying to prove that we were better at navigating this world than the other was. The tragedy of childhood is that such insights arrive only in retrospect. These two children, myself and my brother, each wanted to be understood and believed that no one could understand them. I want to tell them to listen to each other. 

In my novel American Han, siblings Jane and Kevin Kim come of age in America feeling this same bewilderment and this same needless isolation, something Jane only begins to recognize long after it feels too late to change it. I wanted to explore this and the feeling that even though siblings don’t choose each other, we owe each other parts of ourselves and are implicated in each other’s actions.

The relationship between siblings has a literary history as long and varied as any other kind of relationship, though it seems to me that these stories are less noticed than the tragic romances and the endless stalemates between fathers and sons, mothers and daughters. In the seven books below, we see characters who look to their brothers and sisters with uncertainty, envy, and love, looking for clues as to who and how they should be. 

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

East of Eden is a multigenerational saga set in California’s Salinas Valley. The story focuses on two pairs of brothers—Adam and Charles; Aron and Caleb—in two generations of the Trask family. The brothers are derived from the biblical story of Abel and Cain, in which Cain is so jealous of his brother that he kills him—the original murder, for which Cain is punished with a long life of utter solitude. In East of Eden, Charles frequently erupts in violent rage at his half-brother Adam, convinced that their father loves Adam more, just as Cain was convinced that God valued his brother above himself. In the next generation, Caleb Trask is so envious of the love his twin brother Aron seems to receive without effort that he drives his brother to certain death. Across generations, Charles and Caleb find themselves in the ancient predicament of Cain: unable to understand why they are not loved as their sibling is, and unable to accept it. 

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Sisters Ruthie and Lucille Stone spend their childhoods moving among guardians after their mother dies. Eventually, their aunt Sylvie, a wanderer, moves back to the sisters’ tiny hometown of Fingerbone, Idaho and decides to raise them. Their home reflects Sylvie’s transient nature, full of stacks of old newspapers, cobwebs, and assorted debris. The sisters are inseparable, but soon Ruthie starts to take after her aunt, while Lucille longs for a different life, one that mirrors the aspirations of the people around them. Lucille tries to convince Ruthie to build a life around the values of respectability and cleanliness, but Ruthie feels bonded to their aunt. Ruthie has to choose between Sylvie’s itinerant freedom and the more conventional (and safer) life her sister pursues. While the clash between sisters is quiet, it offers a deep exploration of the sibling as a mirror of the self, as each sister looks to the other as a model of who they want (and don’t want) to be. 

Erasure by Percival Everett

This hilarious satirical novel takes on a publishing industry whose narrow and condescending expectations of the Black experience limit the kinds of stories that are published and valued. In addition to the razor-sharp satire, I was drawn to the family story: Monk’s strained relationships with his parents, brother, and sister. Monk is the favored child, the one born naturally gifted, even though his sister, Lisa, is the responsible one—a successful doctor who looks after their mother as she struggles with Alzheimer’s disease. Like Aron Trask in East of Eden, Monk basks in parental adoration without doing much of anything to earn it, while Lisa does everything expected of her only to be ignored or taken for granted. Their relationship captures the sense of intractable and even incomprehensible unfairness that has been at the core of sibling rivalry at least since the story of Cain and Abel.

The Dutch House by Ann Patchett

Danny Conroy and his older sister Maeve are kicked out of their childhood home—a sprawling mansion on the outskirts of Philadelphia—by their stepmother after their father’s death. From the age of 10 until her death, Maeve is a mother figure to Danny, assuming all responsibility for raising him. Hellbent on getting revenge on their stepmother, who inherited everything except an educational trust set aside for the children, Maeve encourages Danny to attend an expensive boarding school, then Columbia, and eventually medical school. Danny does as Maeve wishes even though his interests lie elsewhere. Like nothing else I’ve read, this novel conveys the slow accretion of choices by which one sibling’s life, almost imperceptibly, can be subsumed by the other’s obsessions.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Identical twins Desiree and Stella Vignes grow up in Mallard, Louisiana in the 1970s, in a Black community where light skin confers status and a modicum of protection from the virulent racism that surrounds the community. At age 16, the Vignes twins run away to New Orleans to chase their dreams. Over a decade later, their lives have completely diverged. Desiree is back in Mallard with her dark-skinned daughter after fleeing an abusive husband. Stella is passing as a white woman in California, where she lives with her businessman husband and their daughter. Stella chose to abandon her sister and give up her history and identity for a chance to claim the privilege that comes with whiteness. Desiree spends much of her life searching for her missing sister, who has vanished into whiteness as much as she has physically vanished from the sisters’ Louisiana home. In the divergent fates of Desiree and Stella, Bennett traces how race and racism shape the possibilities of life in America. 

All-Night Pharmacy by Ruth Madievsky

In this funny, deeply moving debut novel, a young woman’s life in Los Angeles begins to unravel when her toxic relationship with older sister, Debbie, implodes after a chaotic night of drugs and violence ends with Debbie’s disappearance. The unnamed narrator, cautious by nature, has always been drawn to the alluring and reckless Debbie, and has often emulated her against her own better judgment. Now, in Debbie’s absence, she spirals into addiction and a blurry relationship with Sasha, a Jewish refugee from the former Soviet Union who claims to be a psychic. Will she try to find her missing sister, or find a new freedom by keeping her in the past? As she wrestles with her conscience, she confronts the same question Cain asked of God: “Am I my [sister’s] keeper?” 

The Original Daughter by Jemimah Wei

Another riveting debut, The Original Daughter explores family bonds and ambition in a rapidly changing 1990s and 2000s Singapore. The story follows Genevieve Yang, whose life is upended when her family takes in Genevieve’s long-lost cousin Arin. Genevieve and Arin grow up together in government-subsidized housing, navigating adolescence and precarious circumstances amid a hyper-competitive academic culture and an economic boom that only exacerbates inequality. The two grow close, forming a sisterly bond as they both give up having a social life in the quest for a successful future. A betrayal causes a rift between them, forcing Genevieve to choose what is important to her: personal ambitions or family bonds?

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