Resurrection Perhaps you know this scene. The man in black—others refer to him as the creature or the monster—approaches me in the laboratory, Dr. Frankenstein and Dr. Pretorius at my sides. The man in black reaches out his thick arms, puts his strange, shiny hands on me. He pats my hand like he’s trying to guess the contents of a wrapped box. Friend, he calls me. When I pull back from him, he grabs hold of my arm. When I scream, he lunges toward me. Wields his arms like wood

Lydia Kiesling, The Golden State, MCD, 2018, $26. In 2016, Lydia Kiesling published an essay in the New Yorker in which she wrote, “Bureaucratic experiences are like dreams: profoundly affecting, but very boring to hear about.” Two years later, Kiesling published The Golden State, a novel in which she emphatically proves herself wrong. The Golden State’s story is set in motion when Daphne Nilson—an American woman whose Turkish husband, Engin, is stuck in his home country beca

Peter Davis, Band Names & Other Poems, Bloof Books, 2018, $16 The latest poetry collection by Peter Davis is everything that the title implies: a long-form list of band names. The two vertical columns that span more than 200 pages get interrupted periodically by more traditional free-verse lyrics, which take their titles from the names in the list. This stack of buzzwords, quips, puns, and slang may contain no apparent narrative arc, but it captures the contemporary pop cultu

Marream Krollos, Big City, Fiction Collective Two, 2018, $18.95 When you start Marream Krollos’s Big City, you might feel as though you are reading a hopeless horoscope, perturbing yet everyday. Krollos sets up a tension between “I” and “we,” the individual and collective at odds or symbiotic in the urban landscape. In this, she captures the unique sort of loneliness one might face in a crowd—that energy telling us that we are lonely but not alone, part of something that can

Aubade with Wind Chimes and Hesitation Head tucked between the pillow and its ragged blue case, the dog snores more softly now. We fell asleep sometime past ten. At some point, their dog came in too, nuzzling between us, so that our bodies were only a dog’s length apart. They could have left at some point, but didn’t. I woke up around six and, surprised to find them there still— arm draped across the dog, towards me, almost touching its left ear, the one that drifts downwards

Kristen Arnett is the NYT bestselling author of the debut novel Mostly Dead Things (Tin House, ‘19). She is a queer fiction and essay writer. She was awarded Ninth Letter’s Literary Award in Fiction and is a columnist for Literary Hub. Her work has appeared at North American Review, The Normal School, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Guernica, Electric Literature, McSweeneys, PBS Newshour, Bennington Review, Tin House Flash Fridays/The Guardian, Salon, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. Her