Empathy
"There's something very important that I don't understand. How can I be a woman and still be happy?" Anna O. is a thirtyish New Yorker living in the squalid East Village of 1990. Dead friends and junkies on the...
Glory Goes and Gets Some
These stories follow our heroine Glory from a privileged but horrible Upper East Side childhood to the East Village and heroin addiction to rehab in Minnesota and HIV diagnosis. In Minneapolis, Glory discovers the boring-slash-transcendent everyday life that's her reward...
I'm Trying To Reach You
On the day of Michael Jackson's death, former dancer and current half-assed NYU dance scholar Gray Adams finds himself sad, alone, and bored late at night in a Zagreb hotel with only the Internet for comfort. Two hours after...
Inferno (a poet's novel)
"My English teacher's ass was so beautiful." From its first sentence, Eileen Myles's Inferno captivates. Winding through the story of linked incidents in her life, Myles writes about being a writer, being a woman, being a lesbian, the 1980s...
Loitering With Intent
"How wonderful it feels to be an artist and a woman in the twentieth century," Fleur Talbot, a young writer living in 1948 London, is given to exclaiming. But the circumstances of Fleur's life -- a small room with...
Maidenhead
On Spring Break vacation with her family in Key West, a 16 year old Canadian named Myra wanders away from her family and becomes initiated into a fascinating and possibly dangerous world of sexual perversity. Myra continues to explore her newly...
Making Scenes
There are a lot of horrifying yet quotidian experiences that fiction rarely depicts. This book is full of them. But its narrator isn't trying to shock or disgust you, or to provoke your sympathy. She is simply describing: incest, bulimia,...
Mercury
Dirty and full of alchemy and dark magic, sex and unrequited love and requited hate and also self-hatred and self-love, Ariana Reines' messages and incantations have the permanence of all great art and catchy radio jingles: they seem always...
Nine Months
Sonia already has two little kids, so when she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant with a third, she's not thrilled. She had been looking forward to freedom from the tyranny of diapers, spit-up, and sleepless, sexless nights. Before becoming "a...