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I’ve always been haunted by choice. I want the city and the forest. Freedom but also babies. A home and the open highway. I love it when other people choose anything for me—dinner spots, weekend plans, hiking trails. It’s one tiny decision I’m absolved from making. To choose is to be culpable and as a former evangelical kid, there are few things I hate more than being culpable. But being unable to choose becomes its own choice. When youdon’t decide, a decision still arrives. Once I held the fleeting body of a farm cat newly struck on theside of a…
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Reaching blindly in the dark, acornsstill grow roots, even when shut in a metal tinin a dark, dry room. I should know,I put them there. I was six years old andI wanted a forest in my closet. I counted outone hundred acorns from beneath the post oakin the front yard, and I waited, and I waited, andI waited, until I forgot what I was waiting for.And the acorns grew. I have been like the roots, too: blind anddirty, secret, forgotten, reaching out for a shapethat my body could fill, yearning for a groundto stand on. I was waiting for a…
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4/5 I picked this up from a bookstore down the street called Gladys Books and Wine. It was a random choice–I’d never heard of the title or author before–and I’m so glad I stumbled onto it. Like Happiness tackles the same subject matter that’s been rising in popularity since the MeToo movement first started a few years ago, but it does so in what I find to be a particularly unique and compelling way. The story jumps back and forth between the narrator’s interactions with a journalist regarding her former ambiguous relationship with a famous author and her letter to…
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I will make jokes at my own expense, be charming as a surprise. I will ask about your new life and Be Cool About It and I will not mention Memphis. Or how your hair feels in my hands. I will not mention the last time I saw you. My mouth, so far from yours, I saidI am afraid I will spend entire yearstrying not to need you.As if I wasn’t certain.As if this wasn’t my confession.
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In the old days, Whiskey greeted her at the front door every morning. Fourteen-hour overnight shifts were no match for the cat’s crippling separation anxiety. Now, she was lucky to get more than one glimpse of her speckled brown coat per day. “Whiskey! Breakfast!” she calls, and cracks open a pink can of Fancy Feast, a feeble attempt at enticing the cat out of her hiding spot. James had never let her buy wet food for Whiskey, usually picking up one of those cheap, unappetizing orange-and-pink kibble mixes himself. It was one of the first parts of her daily routine…
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2/5 I wanted to like Housemates so badly. It was recommended by several people, and it sounds like exactly the type of thing I would usually love. A queer roadtrip? Yes, please! Unfortunately, this book missed the mark for me. To start, the narration style was nonsensical, chaotic, and inconsistent. It’s seemingly told by a mythical elder lesbian artist who is sometimes omniscient, sometimes not. If you haven’t read this book and think this sounds cool, I promise, it’s not. It’s incredibly distracting and feels voyeuristic in a deeply unsexy and uncomfortable way—one of the worst narrator choices I have…
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Utopia is an impossible demand. Most likely, it’s what happens when no one’s looking. On Grindr, my profile stated: DESIRE IS A PLANET TRAPPED INSIDE AN EVEN BIGGER PLANET. The men I met were aroused by the world; I was aroused by the opposite of the world. Turns out there can be so much night inside a single man that to be contained within it is a kind of violence. Turns out the body is so much more than I ever bargained for. Of course I didn’t love them properly—I livedwith the vastness and loneliness of a continent. Please don’t…
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A shotgun in the backyard silences the barking. Don’t misunderstand me, the man has not shot his dog. In the morning, when the man wakes, the bitch will be gone, her only trace the holes she chewed in his once-brand-new suede leather boots. The other dogs will howl until they tire of the raucous and return to lick the man’s bare feet while he weeps. The man, who will witness the great return. The man, who only cries when he’s not alone. The man, who forgets he was something else first. He prays for the end…
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5/5 Endling was my favorite read of 2025 so far. I discovered Maria Reva a few years ago when she had just published her debut novel, Good Citizens Need Not Fear, and I’ve been eagerly waiting for more since. Good Citizens was an interconnected short story collection that follows the residents of an accidentally uncataloged apartment building in Ukraine. The book’s characters and unusual style left quite an impression on me and I think about it often. Endling was no different. The plot is ingenious bordering on insane. I’m fairly certain no one else would have come up with a…
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You grow old. You love everybody. You forgive everyone. You think: we are all leaves dragged along by a wheel. Then comes a splendid spotted yellow one—ah, distinction! And in that moment you are dragged under.
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