Taylor’s debut novel is a rich and intimate portrait of the life of a Black gay grad student on the fringes of predominantly white normative academia. Unfolding over a single weekend , it follows Wallace as he endures the aftershocks of painful memories from his growing up as well as the abrasions that come with being an outsider. Taylor is a master at conveying his character's acute discomfort, and what initially seems a typical campus novel soon becomes a stirring meditation on race, sexuality, grief, trauma, and how these affect one’s personhood. In prose as accomplished as his psychological insight, Taylor delivers a difficult and beautiful work that avoids tidy resolutions and demonstrates the ways pain helps make life real.
Eva is notorious for keeping her secrets, only revealing her life—if that’s what she does—once it’s seemingly over. The narrator of Jones’s stunning second novel (published in 1976 and more vital than ever), Eva has been sentenced to a prison for the criminally insane for killing and mutilating her lover. Locked in with her memories—and a volatile cell mate who bates and laughs at her—she obsessively replays thirty+ years of verbal and physical abuse by men. As she tells and retells her story she also relates those of other Black women, making the novel an important act of witnessing—and essential reading. But beyond the unblinking look at Black women’s brutalization, as well as how the currents of violence also damage the men, the book is valuable for Jones’s jaw-dropping literary skill. Eva’s interior monologue is a mesmerizing weave of repetition and rhythm; intercutting multiple scenes and voices—often two or three different ones simultaneously—Jones impeccably captures oral cadences to convey the textures of people caught in anger, pain, and frustrated longing.
Summer Fun is an absolutely wild ride of obsession, music fandom, and trans identity. It shimmers with a particular queer high magic, a spell that's beyond sentences. It is a new form of an epistolary novel that immerses you in Thornton's vision of 1960s New Mexico and the messy, complex inner world of the characters. If you loved Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, by Andrea Lawlor, or Vernon Subutex, by Virginie Despentes, this is your next read.
