Lauren Aimee Curtis

On a hot day in late June, a young girl kneels outside a convent, then falls on her face. When the nuns take her in, they name her Dolores. Dolores adjusts to the rhythm of her new life - to the nuns with wild hairs curling from their chins, the soup chewed as if it were meat, the bells that ring throughout the day. But in the dark, private theatre of her mind are memories - of love motels lit by neon red hearts, discos in abandoned hospitals and a boy called Angelo. And inside her, a baby is growing.

Dolores

Giulia is ten. She lives on the greenest island in a volcanic archipelago. She has never left. Her best friend, beside her older sister, Giovanna, is a donkey. She ties ribbons around his head and thinks she will marry him when the time comes. The sisters' days on the island are shaped by ritual, community, superstition and isolation. It is a place that feels stuck in time: verdant, plentiful, peaceful. Until the men arrive. And a foreign yacht anchors at the port. And the vines begin to fail. And everything changes. From the author of Dolores, Strangers at the Port is an exquisite, enchanted, atmospheric novel about myth and memory, suspicion and dislocation, emigrants and explorers.

Strangers at the Port

Dolores is a glowing, beating heart of a book; Curtis' sentences manage to be both mysterious and precise, creating a potent atmosphere that resonates beyond its brevity -- Megan Hunter, author of THE END WE START FROM Dolores reads the way a first novel should: short, lyrical, intense, and with adventurous ambition -- Nell Zink, author of THE WALLCREEPER and MISLAID Rich, melodic and marked by a troubling sensuality, Dolores depicts the strange pleasures a young girl might take in her body, and the perils and liberations such pleasures hold -- Sue Rainsford, author of FOLLOW ME TO GROUND On a hot day in late June, a young girl kneels outside a convent, then falls on her face. When the nuns take her in, they name her Dolores. Dolores adjusts to the rhythm of her new life - to the nuns with wild hairs curling from their chins, the soup chewed as if it were meat, the bells that ring throughout the day. But in the dark, private theatre of her mind are memories - of love motels lit by neon red hearts, discos in abandoned hospitals and a boy called Angelo. And inside her, a baby is growing.

Kate Zambreno

Emily Bitto

Luc Sante

Travis Jeppesen

Wayne Koestenbaum

Natalie Eilbert

Brigitta B. Wagner

Annabel Brady-Brown

Leo Goldsmith

Madeleine Martiniello

Max Nelson

Matthew Porterfield

Agnès Godard

Elena Gomez

Claudia La Rocco

James Lattimer

Justin Wolfers

Rebecca Harkins-Cross

Lauren Carroll Harris

Fireflies Issue #5 pairs a living legend of French cinema with an artist yet to receive due recognition outside of her native Germany, despite being one of the country's pre-eminent cineastes. The issue discusses, dismantles, reinterprets and creatively plays with their cinema, featuring insightful longform interviews with both directors, alongside 29 responses from critics, novelists, poets, filmmakers and visual artists who work with video, sound, photography and sculpture.

Agnès Varda

Fireflies #5

Lauren Aimee Curtis

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