Folk’s deft navigation between sardonic optimism and buoyant fatalism is perfectly calibrated to the utter strangeness of being alive today, when the closeness of our private devices pushes us farther from each other and getting swept up in the machinery can feel safer than the turbulence of true attachment. After all, worst case scenario, the plane crash might just kill you.

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“When Elle was twelve, her father purchased a private guided tour of the Musée d’Orsay for the two of them. He had just gotten divorced from Elle’s mother, who had announced she would use the settlement to travel around Europe. Elle’s father, however, wanted to win and whisked Elle away to France first. Elle was accustomed by then to seeing herself as an asset her parents could barter, and she was glad to at least be considered their prized possession.”

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The iconoclastic, Oscar-nominated actress Chloë Sevigny reads the audiobook with a kind of wry weariness, or a weary wryness, mirroring the way its trio of antiheroines tend to talk about one another to one another. The unwavering flatness of her affect matches perfectly the setting’s intellectual milieu — Celine teaches feminist theory at U.C. Berkeley — and the women’s emotional uncertainty, while also augmenting their reluctant in-this-togetherness. Sevigny’s unpretentious performance of these frequently pretentious people is for the most part marvelous.

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They say not to use high beams in fog. The water vapor refracts the intense glare of headlights back toward the driver in a way that actually decreases visibility. Best, then, to use low light. This is the vibe of a story by Emma Cline, who writes so luminously about the haziness of female desire that even the most revelatory moments unfold in a sort of soft focus. She writes so sharply about the uncertain contours of women’s wanting that the effect is one of compelling, almost pleasurable edgelessness.

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“Diary of a Misfit” is at once dewy-eyed and diligent, capricious and capacious, empathetic and exacting. It’s as richly textured as a pot of gumbo…Most moving is Parks’s depiction of a queer lineage, her assertion of an ancestry of outcasts, a tapestry of fellow misfits into which the marginalized will always, for better or worse, fit. Our selves are so often an assemblage of the stories of those who came before.

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In The Secret to Super Human Strength, Bechdel finds kinship in the literary legacies of transcendentalist writers—among them Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and Jack Kerouac—and draws on them to examine the relationship between outdoor workouts and making art. The result is a wondrous exploration of how an obsession with exercise—"the sweat, the endorphins, the gear, the togs, the next new thing!"—can be self-care and a means of connecting with the world at large.

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“Edie, the capricious millennial narrator of Raven Leilani’s strikingly observed debut novel, Luster, first encounters her lover—23 years her senior—in the flesh at Six Flags […] What ensues over the next 200-plus pages is indeed a wild ride: an irreverent intergenerational tale of race and class that’s blisteringly smart and fan-yourself sexy.”

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“On its surface, the setup is familiar, but Pochoda’s ingeniously structured white-knuckler is concerned with upending assumptions; these pages dare us to interrogate what we believe, especially when it comes to who does or doesn’t deserve our sympathy.”

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“[T]he duo revisits their roots, going back to their adolescence and young adulthood and the development of their identities before the record deals. Their book offers queer kids (and adults, heterosexual or otherwise) vital, non-didactic lessons on how to find one's voice—and how it's okay to mess up along the way.”

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“If we are what we wear, the Portofino tells my story well. The blouse's plainness captures my androgyny as well as my wish to not stick out. No one's ever going to compliment my outfit, and that's fine. As an only child, I've gotten used to assigning meaning to things independent from the attention of others.”

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“In a way, it felt like I was reentering the world as my mother was leaving it. Understanding my desire brought with it the possibility of new life—something increasingly unavailable to my mother.”

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“I sat down with Rooney to discuss her work, along with everything from sex and love to the role of time and technology in her prose—plus the unwitting pressure of being lauded as the fictional voice of her generation.”

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“Her Body and Other Parties is a masterful assemblage of tales that is at once luminous and dingy, sexy and terrifying, queer and mundane. These wondrous stories remind readers not only that the lives of women are full of paradoxes and contradictions, but that fiction as an endeavor is especially powerful when it takes as its task the examination of these ambiguities.”

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“Radtke definitely desires to be everywhere, but just as pressing is the desire to be elsewhere. She wants more: more sights, more sounds, more stories, more life, more time. For many women who want to create art, it’s all too easy to imagine wanting only what we’re supposed to want.”

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