​Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters is a novel about a trans woman, Reese, a once trans woman, Ames (Amy), and Katrina discussing and prepping to have a child together. Reese and Ames used to date when Ames had once been Amy, a trans woman. However, when Reese begins to secretly date a married man, Stanley, and Amy finds out, their relationship turns sour. This creates a rift in their relationship, and is one of the suspicions Reese has of Amy’s detransition: that Amy was scared not of being a woman, but of how others saw her. Ames then comes back into Reese’s life after he gets his boss pregnant and isn’t up to being a parent, so decides to enlist Reese, who really wants to be a mother, in raising Katrina’s child. As they get to know each other, Katrina invites Reese to an essential oil party where Katrina reveals to her friends that she’s pregnant and Reese reveals that she’s trans. Then, at a dinner later that day, they are at a restaurant when a man Reese recognizes, her boyfriend, arrives to the dinner as the husband to one of Katrina’s friends. This causes Katrina to truly question Reese as a person, and whether she would be fit to be included in her family. Eventually, after an angry email, and a walk into the frigid ocean, Reese tries to convince Katrina to keep the child, though Katrina is already at this point apprehensive. Though, the novel ends at this moment before the abortion appointment, with the rest of what happens being implied.
 
I really liked the frankness of the novel as well as the way Peters weaves in the past and present. It feels as though I’m getting a close look at the intricacies of queer relationships, how people view them, and what it means to be a person. Peters shows her characters, not as the quintessentially perfect queers some media tends to do, but as people who make mistakes and have to owe up to their actions. It’s a beautiful rendition of what it means to desire motherhood, exist as trans, and what people will do to fight for created families.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Blackouts by Justin Torres is a novel about a young man returning to the bedside of an older gay gentleman who is dying. It’s a story framed within the context of both a conversation as well as archival images and text that is blacked out. The discussions of the men range from the author and researcher, Jan Gay, and her work in the book Sex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patterns all the way to their own lives, their sexual encounters, and loves they experienced. In the end, the old man, Juan, begins to forget everything, and then dies in the young man’s arms one night.
 
What Torres does absolutely well here is the blurring of fiction and non-fiction—of lies and truth. Jan, the book, the studies, and some of the characters are firmly from history. However, Torres plays with us when the speaker discusses Juan and if he ever met/talked with him. Though, I don’t feel that whether Juan existed or not is what’s important, rather it was the connection the speaker and Juan had and their conversations which provided an outlet for them to digest their lives. I also found some of the novel’s framing to be interesting, particularly when they start describing their lives and memories as movie scenes. The novel feels as though we are peeking into such private moments, and I appreciate the vulnerability and humor of the characters.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Rashomon and Other Stories by Ryunosuke Akutagawa is a collection of six short stories focusing on the lives of samurai, priests, and pre-war Japan. The first, ‘In a Grove’, is about a murder of a man, told through interviews with a police officer, some of them witnesses, the suspect, the wife, and finally the dead man through a medium. On three of the accounts, all of the speakers describe themselves as the killer, all with differing motives. The truth is never revealed, though provides a look at how the world can be viewed differently even if everyone witnesses the same thing. The second story, ‘Rashomon’, tells the story of a hungry samurai who would never resort to becoming a thief, but when he sees a woman pulling hair out of corpses at the top of a gate, he steals everything she owns. Another interesting story is, ‘The Martyr’, in which an orphan is raised by a church, but his duty to the church is questioned when a girl says she is having his child. The orphan is then excommunicated, becomes a beggar, and only when the town burns down does he save the daughter people think different about him. However, the fire burned him so badly he dies by the feet of the girl, where it is revealed the orphan was actually a girl. And finally, the last story, ‘The Dragon’, follows a priest who decides to play a trick on the other priests because they make fun of his nose. He decides to make up the fact that a dragon will ascend to heaven from the pond. From this rumor, everyone from the town as well as the surrounding areas gather to see the dragon, although he knows it to be a lie. However, it turns out a dragon does ascend to heaven and the priest is left wondering if it actually happened.
 
This collection of stories was fascinating, not only in the stories themselves, but how they are framed. One takes the form of interview monologues, another adds an imagined post script, and another frames the story inside of another story. It was a fun read, especially, ‘The Dragon’, in which Akutagawa displays how lies can manifest themselves into being.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The Enlightenment of Katzuo Nakamatsu by Augusto Higa Oshiro is a novel about an older Japanese man living in Lima where he feels suspicious of the world around him. Thus begins his tumble into insanity where he believes people are watching him, he hears birds but they’re not there, and he sees his father’s friend, Etsuko Untén, appear before him as a ghost. Katzuo loses his job at the university he works for because he’s become too old, and so he spends most of his time ambling around the streets, lost in thought, and trying to embody Etsuko Untén. Then one day, as he is on his walk and his condition has worsened, he sees a boy. Katzuo goes up to the boy, and exclaims the boy’s beauty while undressing. This causes Katzuo to be institutionalized, and a medium is brought in to diagnose his problems. It’s revealed that many of Katzuo’s hallucinations (the birds and Etsuko), are manifestations of the terribleness of the war and Etsuko’s continual desire for Japan to win.
 
The novel is full of descriptions, moments, and intriguing sentence structures that create a sense of Katzuo’s insanity. I enjoyed how there came to be a reason for what happened to Katzuo and it felt like I could understand the character fully.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut is a novel about a journalist who is on a search to interview and write about one of the fathers of the nuclear bomb. He finds out that one of the children is a General of an island nation called San Lorenzo. There, the narrator takes a trip to the island where a confounding religion has taken hold of the population, but the rulers try to snuff it out. The narrator then finds out that the man who created the nuclear bomb also created something called ice-nine, which is a crystalized form of water with a melting temperature of 114 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus, would be cataclysmic if it ever touched the ocean. The narrator then is asked to be the next ruler of San Lorenzo, the ruler dies by ice-nine, and at a ceremony celebrating the death of people that were shipped out for World War II, one of the planes in the ceremony crashes into the ruler’s palace. The dead body of the ruler falls into the sea where everything then freezes over. The narrator survives in a bunker, writes his novel about the end of the world, and finally meets the person who started the religion, Bokonon.
 
The novel is satirical in its nature, commenting both on the creation of religion and its false persecution, the cold war in which both the US and Russia have shards of ice-nine, and the absurdity of the characters. Throughout, the narrator discusses his feelings related to Bokononism and uses it to deepen his understanding of the world that exists in that final moment. It’s a quippy, dark, and funny read.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka is a novel about a group of people who are religiously committed to a swimming pool underground. One day, a crack appears on the bottom of the pool and it becomes a mysterious subject either avoided or talked about incessantly. Eventually, the crack causes some people to leave, while the pool decides to shut down due to maintenance and the crack. The novel then begins to focus on one specific character, Alice, who lived through the Japanese American Internment camps and mental state slowly deteriorates, leading her to be put in hospice. The end of the novel resides with Alice’s daughter who contemplates the memories of her mother, and the state of her mother before and after Alice’s death.
 
The novel takes interesting directions with its approach to voice, with the first part in the voice of a collective “we”, believed to be one of the swimmers at the pool. Another part is from the voice of Alice’s daughter, and another part is from the voice of the care facility. It’s an interesting route to go, making the text and narrative feel that the characters are being directed either by the pool officials or the narration of the care facility (rather than from their own free will). I was also intrigued by the seriousness (and humor) with which the swimmers approached the crack and its appearance. Overall, it was a powerful though sad novel.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Life for Sale by Yukio Mishima is a novel about a copywriter, Hanio, who tries to kill himself, but fails. He then decides to put his life up for sale in the newspaper, which kickstarts a collection of desperate people who want to use him. The first man wants him to sleep with his young wife, get caught, and killed. Another woman wants him to test a poison concocted from beetles for a Western buyer. A boy wants him to sleep with his mother, who turns out to be a vampire, while the mother intends to kill both her and Hanio in a fire. Two spies enlist his help in testing out poisonous carrots and deciphering letters. And finally, a woman asks for him to live with her and pay his rent, while she intends to kill him with her. Many of these instances are connected through the Asia Confidential Service (ACS), who believes him to be an undercover cop trying to unravel their international murders. In the end, the ACS captures him, but he outwits them with a stopwatch in a box which he says is a bomb. However, when Hanio goes to the police to report the ACS, he is brushed off as he is seen as crazy and homeless.
 
The novel shows Hanio wanting to die, but through the course of its narration, he seems to stumble out of harms way. He cannot kill himself, the women that ask for his services intend to commit suicide with him, but he always inexplicably slips away from danger. This is what drives the story forward: Hanio’s desire for death and Mishima denying his death. The novel, however, depicts women in an oddly misogynistic light with its descriptions of their bodies, their singular desires to have sex with Hanio, and their melodramatic suicides either in the face of a gun, a fire, or poison. All that being said, it’s a fast-paced and tense novel throughout, and I found Hanio’s situation to be both surreal and ironic.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​A Hundred Lovers by Richie Hofmann is a collection of poems focusing on the erotic, gay, and tender moments the speaker remembers with his past lovers. I particularly enjoyed ‘One Another’, with its lines, “How easily the earth closes / its cavities.” I also enjoyed ‘Spring Wedding’, ‘Mummified Bird’, ‘Opulence’, and ‘French Novel’. ‘Spring Wedding’ fractures its stanzas between the erotic (the first half) and the mundane with “We will have children. / We will buy another house.” The imagery is stark and the collection isn’t afraid to take on themes of sexuality with precision.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​A Shameful Life by Osamu Dazai is a novel framed within discovered journal entries meant for a previous lover of the character Yōzō, which describe his distance from society, his previous suicide attempts, and his drug/alcohol abuse. The story begins with Yōzō’s childhood where he realizes he needs to make everything he says a joke to disguise his disconnection from the world. From this, he meets a schoolmate, Takeichi, who gives him two predictions: that women will fall for him, and that he’ll be a great artist. He tests into a great higher school, though when he attends, he can’t seem to concentrate (he also meets one of his friends, Horiki, at this school who brings him into the Leftist party). Along the way, he meets a woman, Tsuneko, who decides to commit suicide with him, but Yōzō survives and she doesn’t. He’s kicked out of school for being part of someone’s suicide, and he goes to back to a friend’s house, Flounder’s, where he recovers and tries to pick up the pieces. This is when he starts to seriously draw his cartoons, which get picked up by Shizuko, his next girlfriend and a connection to large magazines. But even then, Yōzō drifts to another woman, Yoshiko, who is seen as innocent and virgin, so Yōzō decides to be with her. However, one night when he and Horiki are talking, they find Yoshiko with another man. Yōzō drinks so much and his health is deteriorating. He decides to kill himself with sleeping pills, but it doesn’t work. At the end he is taken to a mental hospital, and he charges himself with the question, “I’d never, not for a moment, gone mad. Ah, but I suppose that’s the sort of thing a lunatic would say.” At the end of his stay, he’s taken back to his brother’s place where he attempts suicide again, but the sleeping pills are replaced by laxatives.
 
It isn’t hard to see the parallels between Dazai’s life and Yōzō through the failed suicide attempts and the drug and alcohol abuse. It’s a novel that both feels confessional and reserved. Yōzō sees himself as different from society, and that he tries to disguise that through clowning around. And in part, some of Yōzō’s behavior may be explained through the slight references to his childhood servants doing bad things to him. The framing of the novel is also really interesting, with the journal entries being bookended by a random traveler looking for food. It’s a terribly sad novel, one that feels achingly close to Dazai’s life and for that reason, I found its portrayal of the human experience to be exacting.
 
Final Rating: 4.5/5

​Holy American Burnout! by Sean Enfield is a collection of essays ruminating and expanding upon being a middle school teacher at a Muslim school during the lead up to the 2016 presidential election. Enfield discusses his frustration and sadness of the inhumane treatment of Black people in America, police brutality, islamophobia, and where he fits into the whole mix. The collection experiments with form, in one essay structured as if a lesson plan, another structured in acts, and others bouncing between space/time and pop culture. I particularly enjoyed the essays ‘To Pimp a Mockingbird – Lesson Plan’, ‘Teacher, Don’t Teach Me Nonsense’, ‘All My Niggas Was white – Notes from the Color Line’, and ‘To Be (or not to be) in a Rage Almost All the Time – An Essay in Five Acts’. It’s a lovely and powerful collection and I am happy to have been part of the team to publish it.
 
4.5/5