The South
A failing farm in southern Malaysia. A queer attraction formed across unequal access to exit. The South asks who can leave, and at what cost.
Notes on Books
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01
Essay
Explanation Under Pressure
An event occurs without becoming motive. Explanation is demanded, but the act remains without justification.
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02
Essay
Reading Queer Life
How queer life in literature is shaped by scrutiny, secrecy, attachment, violence and memory across the archive.
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03
Essay
Reading Masculinity
Fourteen novels under pressure. Masculinity tested through structure, control, and collapse.
Women Without Men
A compressed feminist fable set around 1950s Iran, where women leave male authority and find freedom taking stranger, unfinished forms.
Handsome
A novel of marriage, memory and Alzheimer's narrated by a woman whose case against her husband survives her failing mind.
1984
Orwell’s novel is strongest where control appears through objects, rooms and procedures. Its final section weakens when explanation overtakes experience.
While The World Slept
A Nigerian short story collection about queer life, family pressure, religious judgement and the cost of being known.
Box Hill
A six-year BDSM relationship written as a study of unequal access: a flat without a key, a man without a surname, a death without a grave.
Explanation Under Pressure
An event occurs without becoming motive. Explanation is demanded, but the act remains without justification.
The Meursault Investigation
Kamel Daoud answers The Stranger by naming Musa, the Arab killed by Meursault, then traces the damage through grief, language and revenge.
The Land in Winter
During the winter of 1962–63, four people try to keep marriages, animals, patients and unborn children alive after the terms of their lives have begun to fail.
Country People
A warm, loose comedy of family, belief and Vermont eccentrics. Generously constructed, intermittently brilliant, and approximately one hundred pages too forgiving of itself.
I Make Envy on Your Disco
Nothing translates for Sam Singer in Berlin: not the signs, not the city, not what he cannot say to the man waiting in New York.
The Weight of Angels
Decades stolen from Oscar Wilde are returned, but their moral cost is laid bare.