Cristina Rivera Garza

On a dark and stormy night, two mysterious women invade an unnamed narrator’s house, where they proceed to ruthlessly question their host’s gender and identity. The increasingly frantic protagonist fails to defend his supposed masculinity and eventually finds himself in a sanatorium. A Gothic tale of destabilized male-female binaries and subverted literary tropes, this is the book's first English publication.

The Iliac Crest

Kai Hatcher

Nica Rhiana

You need the ocean for this: to stop believing in reality. To ask yourself impossible questions. To not know. To cease knowing. To become intoxicated by the smell. To close your eyes. To stop believing in reality.

Angela Zeiler

All of a sudden, without warning, autumn moved across the coast as if it were at home here. 

And we say with utmost certainty that this is a lie. But we say it anyway, so as to save ourselves from shame and humiliation. [...] We hope that the woman believes it and that, upon doing so, leaves, satisfied, going anywhere else with her own horror in tow.

The ocean soothes me. Its massive presence makes me think, believe even, that the world is quite small. Dull. Insignificant. Without it, the weight of existence proves fatal to me.

The lines about the sea in this book are amazing 🥰

I was almost melancholic, but instead I looked out to the sea, her nocturnal silence, her immense mass. [...] How many of them knew the ocean so intimately, savoring her without resentment, gradually learning not to fear her?

From the moment I walked into the ward, I noticed that, unlike its usual semidarkness, the room was pierced with light. The window was exceptionally clean. From afar the mercurial clarity it emitted gave the impression of a mirror.

It was raining now, as had become an everyday occurrence. It rained with that tiring and frightening noise of regular things. It was raining outside and I felt miserable, curled into a fetal position inside myself.

While gray and low, the clouds let just enough of the sun's light filter through to leave a mercurial tint on the crests of the waves.

The Iliac Crest quotes

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