Therese Estacion?survived a rare infection that nearly killed her, but not without losing both?her legs below the knees, several fingers, and reproductive organs.?Phantompains?is a visceral, imaginative?collection?exploring disability, grief and life by interweaving stark?memories with magic surrealism. Taking inspiration?from Filipino horror and folk tales, Estacion incorporates some Visayan language into her work, ?telling stories of mermen, gnomes and ogres that haunt childhood?stories of the?Philippines and, then, imaginings in her hospital room, where she spent months after her operations, recovering. There is a dreamlike?quality to these pieces, rivaled by depictions of pain, of amputation, of hysterectomy, of disability, ?and the realization of catastrophic change. Estacion says she?wrote these poems out of necessity: an essential task to deal with the trauma?of hospitalization and what followed. Now, they are demonstrations of?the power?of our imaginations to provide catharsis, preserve memory, rebel and even to find?self-love.

Dark, cutting, and coursed through with bright flashes of humour, crystalline imagery, and razor-sharp detail, I Become a Delight to My Enemies is a gut-wrenchingly powerful, breathtakingly beautiful meditation on the violence and shame inflicted on the female body and psyche. An experimental fiction, I Become a Delight to My Enemies uses many different voices and forms to tell the stories of the women who live in an uncanny Town, uncovering their experiences of shame, fear, cruelty, and transcendence. Sara Peters combines poetry and short prose vignettes to create a singular, unflinching portrait of a Town in which the lives of girls and women are shaped by the brutality meted upon them and by their acts of defiance and yearning towards places of safety and belonging. Through lucid detail, sparkling imagery and illumination, Peters' individual characters and the collective of The Town leap vividly, fully formed off the page. A hybrid in form, I Become a Delight to My Enemies is an awe-inspiring example of the exquisite force of words to shock and to move, from a writer of exceptional talent and potential.

It's just another boring summer for our teenaged narrator — until Barbra arrives. An Ethiopian Jew, Barbra was brought to Israel at age five, a part of Operation Solomon, and now our narrator's well-intentioned father has brought her, as a teen, to their home for the summer. But Barbra isn't the docile and grateful orphan they expect, and soon our narrator, terrified of her and drawn to her in equal measure, finds himself immersed in compulsive psychosexual games with her, as she binge-drinks and lies to his family. Things go terribly wrong, and Barbra flees. But seven years later, as our narrator is getting his life back on track, with a new girlfriend and a master's degree in Holocaust Studies underway, Barbra shows up at our narrator's house once again, her "spiritual teacher" in tow, and our narrator finds his politics, and his sanity, back in question. Queen Solomon is another masterful take on the politics of sex, race, and power from the author of the Believer Book Award–winning Maidenhead.

Fiction. Latino/Latina Studies. In the tradition of Borges, Nabakov, and Bola o, THE RED ALBUM is a work of fiction that questions historical authenticity and authority. Divided into two parts, the book begins with an edited and footnoted narrative of dubious origins. In the second part, a section of "documents" (including essays, memoirs, a short play and a filmography) shed light on the first narrative. Familiar characters are revealed to be writers, and the writer and editors of the initial narrative are revealed to be characters. As the ghosts of social revolutions of the past are lifted from the soil in Catalonia, and a new revolution unfolds in South America, the number of mysteriously missing author/characters grows almost as fast as new author/characters emerge and complicate and scatter the threads of the story.

A few days ago, Karen was a writer and translator immersed in Copenhagen's creative scene, madly in love with her partner. Now she's a patient in a psychiatric facility. Hunger Heart is a sensual, profound work of autofiction about love, relationships, mental illness, and recovery by one of Denmark's most celebrated literary writers. Fastrup immerses us in the alienations of her breakdown and hospitalization: what it's like to apologize for threatening your loved one with a knife; how an eating disorder can begin with the discomfort of family and adolescence; and how to make the long journey back to one's creative life. But this is not primarily a book of heartache and damage. We are reminded of the electricity of love and the power of language to support our identities and our lives. Deeply courageous, captivating and affecting, Hunger Heart is as much a balm as it is a firework.