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Lori O'Dea

Lori O’Dea is a fiction writer and literary critic living in Chicago. Her work has appeared in the Massachusetts Review, Rain Taxi, Bridge, the Gay & Lesbian Review, and other publications. She reviews contemporary literature with a focus on works in translation and/or by LGBTQ authors and is currently writing a novel.

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  • O Mother, Where Art Thou
“Sad Tiger” by Neige Sinno, translated by Natasha Lehrer
“Consent” by Vanessa Springora, translated by Natasha Lehrer
“You Won’t Get Free of It” by Rachel Aviv
“Alice Munro’s Retreat” by Anne Enright
“My stepfather sexually abused me when I was a child. My mother, Alice Munro, chose to stay with him” by Andrea Robin Skinner

Voicing experiences of childhood sexual abuse counteracts the techniques perpetrators use to sustain their patterns of criminal abuse; namely, silencing the victim and controlling the narrative about what happened. Sad Tiger by Neige Sinno, recently published in an English translation by Natasha Lehrer, is an intelligent hybrid of survivor memoir

VOLUME 3: ISSUE 3
SUMMER 2025

Valentijn Hoogenkamp. Photo by Jessé Vermeulen.
  • Call Me by My New Name
“Antiboy” by Valentijn Hoogenkamp, translated by Michele Hutchison

Newly discharged from my stay in the literary ICU that is Garth Greenwell’s novel Small Rain, I still had tubes, monitors, and groggy returns to consciousness on my mind when I encountered the narrator of Valentijn Hoogenkamp’s Antiboy waking up in a hospital bed. Surfacing from the anesthetics, Antiboy, Anti

VOLUME 3: ISSUE 2
WINTER 2025