Image: Sewingbug Studio, Nix, from "Club Kids." Image courtesy of Sewingbug Studio, Seoul.
Welcome to our tenth annual Queer issue. In first-person narratives rich with intimacy and immediacy, LGBTQ characters explore the search for success in love and work, negotiate complex sexual and social currents, and grapple with passion and obsession. Matteo Bianchi finds an anxious college senior falling for a surprising partner. Céline Minard’s giddy writer gaily confesses the hoax at the base of her career. Yolanda Arroyo Pizarro channels a tough girl fighting her way into a gang, while Lu Min’s young apprentice tailor tries to take the measure of his enigmatic boss. Iceland’s Kári Tulinius maps a complex triangle, and Stefan Bošković’s hapless writer is dumped twice in one evening. And we have a special section of new queer writing from Korea with fiction from Lee Jong San, Kim Hye-jin, and Kim Bong-gon and poetry by Lee Hyemi, introduced by Anton Hur.
The Queer “I”: The Tenth Queer Issue
All the pieces are told in the first person, lending intimacy and immediacy to the events they describe.
Bruises
It's not very clear to me if he was asking for help or wanting me to leave them alone.
The Lost Language of Crane Operators
Perhaps I’m not ready yet to plan out my entire future, but right now these are the arms I need around me.
Scissors, Shining
Oh, Master Song, who would have guessed your heart was hard as steel?
So Long, Luise
This night sealed, consecrated, my future as a writer absolutely.
Abel’s Autobiography
I had two choices: I could wrest back control of my life or I could die.
bilingual
Search: Porn
I guzzle the wine and ask him if he likes women now.
Book Reviews
Lives and Deaths Imagined: A Review of Gabriela Ybarra’s “The Dinner Guest”
Reviewed by Craig Epplin
The Spanish author and Man Booker International nominee elides the distance between novel and memoir in a book that confronts the killing of her grandfather by the ETA and her mother's death from cancer.
Selahattin Demirtas, Jailed in Turkey since 2016, Makes His Fiction Debut with “Dawn”
Reviewed by Rafia Zakaria
The Turkish writer of Kurdish descent has been jailed since 2016. The stories in Dawn can be read as a series of missives written by Demirtas from the inside, home to so many of the Turkey's best and brightest, dissenters who have refused to bow down to Erdogan’s demands.
“Keeping / the window open” Brings Together a Fascinating Trove of Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop’s Work
Reviewed by Allison Grimaldi-Donahue
From interview to collage, from poetry to prose, from the 1950s to the 2000s, this volume edited by Ben Lerner combines a generous compendium of the Waldrops' work as poets, translators and publishers with a selection of essays and interviews in which they meditate on their craft.