Issue 1.2

OTHER PRESS, MAY 2022, 208 PP. We have always existed everywhere. In the Anglophone world of today, we are called trans women. We have had many names. Different cultures of “gender,” if that’s even the right word, leave different slots open for us. The gender system forced on much of the world by Western colonialism is unusual in how little regard it has for boys who turn out not to be men. Bad Girls is

  KNOPF, MAY 2022, 288 PP. Nightcrawling opens with an apartment pool full of dog feces, the cackles of a woman driven mad by life, and a seventeen-year-old protagonist who’s trying to figure out how to pay the rent. Kiara and her barely older brother, Marcus, live in a crumbling East Oakland apartment complex, left alone by parents who have succumbed to death, prison, or grief. Marcus wants to be a rap star and spends

  GRAND CENTRAL, APRIL 2022, 144 PP. Born from a deeply resonant New Yorker essay of the same title published during the 2020 racial violence protests, The Trayvon Generation expands like a blanket of rain across a parched horizon. Following her critically acclaimed memoir, The Light of the World, Pulitzer Prize finalist and bestselling author Elizabeth Alexander turns her gaze toward anti-Black violence. Meditating on the persisting problem of the color line, Alexander alchemizes Black

  PENGUIN PRESS, MAY 2022, 360 PP. In “The Seducer’s Diary,” a novella from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, a manipulative man stalks and courts a younger girl; soon enough, they are engaged. But the seducer takes his real pleasure in manipulation, not love, and he connives to have the girl break the engagement. Alone and without definitive proof of the man’s past affection, the girl wonders if the whole affair was a figment of her imagination. With

  CATAPULT, MAY 2022, 224 PP. Pyae Moe Thet War’s debut begins and ends with writing. A collection of winding, looping personal essays, You’ve Changed: Fake Accents, Feminism, and Other Comedies from Myanmar follows a writer’s coming-of-age, threading through small revelations as Moe Thet War reconciles her life and her art. Anchoring each piece is her lifelong ambition to write; as a child, she drags her mother to bookstores, attends a summer writing camp, and

  PENGUIN PRESS, APRIL 2022, 128 PP. In February, I attended a reading by the poet Ocean Vuong in New York. There were dozens of us gathered, diligently masked and packed shoulder to shoulder, as he arrived at the podium and opened his new book, Time Is a Mother. His voice was familiarly haunting and incantatory as he read new poems to an audience rippling with nods and soft murmurs, the usual somber reverence of

NYU PRESS, MAY 2022, 256 PP. In 2007, the biochemist and genetic researcher Julia Serano published the spellbinding Whipping Girl, in which she coined the term transmisogyny to name and therefore describe the discrimination directed at trans women as part of a general hatred of women. A year earlier, Paisley Currah coedited the first decisive exploration of the rights of trans people—Transgender Rights (Minnesota University Press, 2006)—and, in 2014, he and Susan Stryker cofounded TSQ: