In this issue, Oliver Bullough travels to Ukraine and Crimea in the wake of revolution; Kerry Howley writes about cage fighting and giving birth in Texas; Molly Brodak remembers her father, a compulsive gambler and failed bank robber; and Bella Pollen describes being visited - repeatedly - by an incubus. Here are fifteen takes on the human drive to possess - a person, a home, a territory - and the many ways we become possessed - by ideas, by desires, by spirits. Also featuring fiction by Marc Bojanowski, Patrick DeWitt, Greg Jackson, Daisy Jacobs, Alan Rossi, Hanan al-Shaykh and Deb Olin Unferth; along with poetry by Rae Armantrout, Anglica Freitas and Jillian Weise; and Photography by Max Pinckers, with an introduction by Sonia Faleiro.

Once they were portrayed as the salt of the earth. Nowadays, they take to the streets when paedophiles and asylum seekers are in their midst; they expose their lives in TV documentaries; they love Gucci and hate the Euro; the broadsheets cast them as xenophobes and exhibitionists and mock their tastes and attitudes. But who are the white working class and what have they done to deserve this portrayal? The Likes of Us is a fascinating and wholly original examination of London's white working class.

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

It's carnival time in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Before an enthralled crowd, Solibo Magnificent, the great teller of tales, is seemingly choked by his own words. Is it astrostrangulation or murder? The two investigating officers discover a transitory universe at the threshold of oblivion.