Prior to reading Andrew Durbin’s The Wonderful World That Almost Was, 2026 (published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on April 14), I had frankly a very brief and limited grasp of Peter Hujar's and Paul Thek's lives and work. The art gallery I used to work for in 2022 curated an online presentation from a selection of Paul Thek’s etchings, reprinted from copper plates originally discovered in his storage unit in 1989, the year after his death. Among a few that the website presented were depictions of “Plums,” “Bouncing Earth,” “Burning Book,” and “Tarbaby.” In my role at the gallery, I had the privilege of encountering Paul Thek’s work in real life for the first time. Artists Paul Thek and Peter Hujar were deeply captivated by rendering the evanescent beauty of the world as well as its atomization. The Wonderful World That Almost Was (2026) is its cinematic testimony, a never-before-told story of two intimately entangled artists who redefined queer art, written by Durbin.

I annotated Wayne Koestenbaum’s My Lover, the Rabbi, in the middle of February, while I was visiting my boyfriend in Zürich. Each day, I walked to the library and clutched the printed galleys in my hands, sandwiched between my iPhone and a bottle of Swiss Alps water. I spent most of my time with the neurotic-and-slightly manic narrator inside the brute-concrete wing of the Swiss National Museum, or Zürich’s Landesmuseum. From the beginning of the novel, the melody and baroqueness of Koestenbaum’s sentences (sometimes spanning across an entire page) harmonized with my view of the Crystalline-clean Limmat river that I faced. My Lover, the Rabbi, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, on March 17, cascades the lyrical rhythm of language with overtly faggy submission and obsessive adoration toward the one and only center of the narrator’s world: the Rabbi. Hyper-sexed, yet tender, and piercing with passion, it is laced with pompous discoveries, frisky fiction and liturgies of incubated love, reflecting darker, more decadent, gripping, yet distinctly human traits.

Have any of you ever imagined logging into your Cloud to find your phone after your death? The strangeness and a sheer, frantic-like ineffability of it? Would a ghost remember a password? Would it qualify for a face recognition app? Perhaps not. I mean, how would or could we? How could we know that? Inside the bardo realm of Amie Barrodale’s novel Trip (2025), Sandra—the protagonist’s soul or its clumsy scraps—attempts to access her former Cloud on her laptop. The habitual memory of what’s left of her reels in between the astral realm of death and rebirth. Within a baffling waiting room with a tapestry of bizarre shapeless entities and spaceless anti-matter, she experiences a perpetual drifting hallucination: all’s twisted and helter-skelter. As though an eidolon from another sphere—never starving, never sleeping, Sandra finds herself always lurking among wispy realities. Hence, quite likely, facial recognition software would not perceive the presence of a nocturnal “bardo-normie.” At least not yet.

“When the sky was dark, I went down to my room to heat up a clothes hanger and press it against the back of my thigh until it went cold.” I read most of Natasha Stagg’s coming-of-age novel Grand Rapids (September 30, 2025) in the Flemish countryside on the 29th of June, with the sun burning my SPF-free skin, Marlboro Golds clouding my lungs, occasionally sipping “vodka, basil, cucumber & ice” gimlets. Stained by sweat or the gimlet’s thaw, some pages wound up saggy and soft. It occurred to me that, like the protagonist’s, my teenage years were long gone—my memories possibly thwarted, or tainted by my own interpretations—their patina forever scraped, they’ve become a cozy place of no return. “I watched skateboarders do tricks in front on railings. Their legs had no knees in their big Gumby pants. There was no outline of a bone to break. The sound of the wheels going over sidewalk seams was a ball scuttling over a roulette wheel but endless.” It’s 2001 and Tess, Stagg’s protagonist, describes the scenery in front of a hospital. She’s fifteen and works at Berrylawn Assisted Living, the fictional nursing home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She has moved in with her aunt, uncle, and their kids, after her mom Sheila dies of cancer. She hates it here. Tess is three things: intoxicated, angsty, and sexually awake. 

The first time I ever heard Dancing on My Own from Robyn was a month or so after it was officially released in 2010. I was 18, visiting my grandmother in bleak Galway, Ireland. I remember looping the song blasting from YouTube on my shitty Android phone back then, over and over again until I got over it the very same day. I had no clue that years later, I’d stumble upon a book borrowing the same eponymous title as Robyn’s song. "If gays don’t make babies when we have sex what do we make?… Just the idea of ourselves, over and over?" Simon Wu ponders in his debut, Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity and Joy, published by Harper Collins in 2024. A writer and artist, a millennial like myself, Wu, who is currently enrolled in the PhD program in History of Art at Yale, told me during our Zoom interview that he “prefers a colloquial way of expressing a really high theoretical thought.”

Suppose that the most visceral and heart-wrenching kind of writing can purge you of suffering, cleanse your soul somehow. In the case of Ariana Reines’s writing, this is not merely a theory but an actual truth. To those unfamiliar with the force majeure of Ariana Reines I would say that her occult, intrepid, and soul-seeping writing is a modern spell. More than simply providing a way out of the perilous mess that we, the world, and our souls find ourselves in, Raines’s work serves as a proposal. Ariana Reines, a Salem-born poet, playwright, and performing artist now based in New York, writes with an ancient and bleeding voice, deglamorizing contemporary poetry and writing at large. Reines is the author of A Sand Book (2019)—winner of the 2020 Kingsley Tufts Award and longlisted for the National Book Award—Mercury, Coeur de Lion, and The Cow, which won the Alberta Prize from Fence in 2006.