The word mews is actually a singular noun, and refers to a row of old stables made or converted into apartments, particularly on a side street in a city full of busier streets.

But White delivers something more powerful: space where we can imagine these characters endlessly wandering and searching.

I’m driving through the Kern Valley near Bakersfield, California. It’s late March, things are blooming and there’s rushing water below the road and walls of rock framing it. I have that rare feeling of “there’s nowhere else in the universe I’d rather be than right here, right now.”

If Wendell’s new memoir endears the reader to a demanding narrator, it also summons the reader’s own demands. This book is written by a horse girl, but it is not only for horse girls or about them.

But I’m tired, and I barely know what day it is, so let’s keep it short: Our reality is bad. Why not spend some time in an absurd, wholesome alternate universe?

In the end, Empty Hearts just isn’t messy enough to compete with our current reality. Which might not be what the author wanted, but still works in its favor during this long, seemingly never-ending, summer of 2020.

For Toarmino, technology is not just a means to communicate with one another. It embeds itself into what we express to each other.

Feder shows the difficult truth of surviving a loss: that life continues to move, though not in a carefully prescribed direction.

At the end of April, I stumbled upon fiber artist Yrúarí’s fanciful work reclaiming old sweaters with audacious red lips sprouting out from everywhere and pointed tongues snaking beyond imagination.

I sit here today, looking at my worn copy of Felon, and feel sad, again. Not for the coffee-stained cover – a sadness intimate to me – but because less than four months ago, things were different.

Twelve is, at its core, a story of women choosing.

What becomes of us, NDiaye seems to ask, when we have no choice but to look below the surface?

We Know This Will All Disappear: An Interview with Melissa Ragsly

It is by way of the voices of this band of dejected antiheroes that Anthropica poses an alarming and timely question: With all we have, why are we still so unhappy?

Kicking Off the Fall Season: Siân Griffiths and Katherine Hill Talk About Their Football Novels

The we voice, that stubborn collective, merges the two women and takes the reader through two lives lived as one.

Every trauma survivor must become an autodidact of their own pain. By telling Taylia’s whole truth in Like a Bird, rather than flattening her into a more marketable heroine, Róisín locates Taylia’s experience within the body rather than as a response to the catalytic forces of plot.

Sheila Squillante’s Mostly Human, winner of the 2020 Wicked Woman Prize from Brickhouse Books, is a different kind of poetry collection. In this interview, Barrelhouse sat down to talk with Sheila about Mostly Human, the Eighties, and her process in writing these wonderfully unique poems.