Glenda's Staff Picks

I will probably never shut up about this book. Family secrets, queer friendships, a newly sober main character who becomes obsessed with what it means to have a meaningful death. Perspectives from every single character interspersed with hilarious, poignant dream sequences and the draft manuscript of a poetry collection, I didn’t want it to end. This was clearly written by a poet and I sobbed while reading the last hundred or so pages.

I saw someone on Tiktok describe this as demon twink literature and it made me cackle. This book is a beautiful and devastating meditation on love, grief, and loyalty with a cast of queer characters who reminded me of people in my own life as a former performance artist and poet with ties to Brooklyn, upstate New York, Berlin, and Mexico City.

This haunting novella is told in two parts: The minutiae of an Israeli soldier’s days leading up to a horrific crime in the wake of the Nakba, and the perspective of a Palestinian woman whose obsession with investigating said crime leads her to meander through settlements and abandoned villages years later. The matter of fact tone and repeated motifs drive home the fact that Israel’s occupation of Palestine is rooted in brutality, and the past and present are inextricably linked.

Dark, creepy, and unsettling–not just in a supernatural way. Model Home follows Ezri, a queer, neurodivergent parent who travels back to the US following the mysterious death of their parents. The novel is an unflinching meditation of the various horrors that manifest inside and outside of the home they grew up in. Check content warnings!

Told from the perspective of a queer lion navigating the hills of ellay who slyly observes and encounters humanity, this is written like a long, beautiful prose poem. Clever, playful, and existential all at once–you could read this in an afternoon.