Emma Cline A month ago, I attended a reading by Emma Cline at BookCourt, in Brooklyn. Cline’s debut novel, The Girls, had just come out to breathless reviews, and the event was well attended. Cline, twenty-seven, seemed neither nervous nor overeager to please. She announced she’d be reading from the beginning of her novel and read its opening passage and then another page or two, stopping after a few minutes and making a joke—that she always wished readings would end sooner than they did—that was at once unpretentious and spot-on. Less-is-more is a concept Cline understands. The Girls is

Brontez Purnell, photo by Robbie Sweeny Mike Albo’s first book, Hornito: My Lie Life (2000), labeled a novel, switches between the viewpoint of a gay kid trying to stay alive physically, mentally, and spiritually in the American suburbs, and that of his adult self, hanging out in New York City’s queer scene in the 1990s. He tries to find love, or decide if he even wants love, while dealing with the world’s association of being gay with “dirtiness.” It feels both true and wildly imaginative, as if the “this is just a novel” shield protected Albo the writer so

Depressed as a teenager in London, Helen Oyeyemi wrote a novel instead of studying for her A-level exams, had it published at the age of twenty, and headed off to Cambridge, where she wrote two plays. Oyeyemi then spent her twenties writing four more novels and traveling the world before settling in Prague, a city with which she felt a mysterious affinity—she sensed there the potential for fantastical happenings.

“Sometimes I joke, well, I must be really good,” says Gary Indiana, sweet and wry, lighting his third cigarette of the four he allows himself daily. “To have been such a fucked-up mess, and to still have a body of work that I think—I hope—will live after me, that means I must really have been good.” We are outside Lucien, the Lower East Side bistro, after our interview, during which he did not swear at all. I note this because in his memoir, I Can Give You Anything But Love, out last year, he complains that one young interviewer added

Darryl Pinckney’s second novel, Black Deutschland, is drifting and elliptical. At its center is Jed, a recovering addict from the South Side of Chicago who makes several long visits to West Berlin. It’s the 1980s, an era Pinckney portrays as blank, scattered, purged of optimism: perfect for a gay black man like Jed, who wants only to snap free of the burdens of “identity.” He falls into affairs and agonizes over the ones that work, all the while navigating an uneasy emotional détente with his cousin Cello, a failed pianist raising mixed-race children with her white, bourgeois husband.

When I first became aware of Garth Greenwell, he was the enigmatic new English teacher at the American College of Sofia in Bulgaria, the high school I had graduated from a year before his arrival in 2009. He became an outspoken advocate of LGBT rights on campus—something that made the school, still attached to its missionary origins, distinctly uncomfortable—and he also introduced a much-discussed fiction assignment that required students to write their own stories modeled after James Joyce’s Dubliners: He wanted them not to look away from the incongruities of their own city, but to make an aesthetic out of

From the opening pages of Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, it’s clear that Carrie Brownstein, best known as a guitarist and singer in the seminal band Sleater-Kinney, and now as an actor and the cowriter and star of Portlandia, is a writer first. Covering her childhood in the Seattle suburbs, her time in the 1990s Olympia, Washington music scene, and her years recording and touring with Sleater-Kinney, the book sets itself apart from the general run of music memoirs: Well turned, subtle, and clear-eyed, it’s a striking literary accomplishment. I was curious above all about what she read and

Few people can be said to have singlehandedly introduced a new body of thought to a foreign country, but that is precisely what the critic, professor, and Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer did throughout the 1970s and ’80s, bringing French theory to these shores via the original Semiotext(e) journal (1974-1985), the famously anarchic “Schizo-Culture” conference at Columbia University in 1975, and, most importantly, the “Foreign Agents” series of pocket-sized paperbacks—English translations of essays and excerpts from Jean Baudrillard, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, and others—which served as literary mind grenades for a generation of American radicals and grad students. Lotringer

This year Verse Chorus Press will reissue four volumes of Tom Adelman’s writings as Camden Joy. Lost Joy compiles Adelman’s early short writings—handwritten Xeroxed manifestos that he once glued up to walls and telephone poles all over New York City, letterpressed tracts about albums he loved, short stories as music criticism, and music criticism as questionably authentic memoir. A pair of novels The Last Rock Star Book: Or: Liz Phair, a Rant and Boy Island, as well as his novella collection 3 by Camden Joy, share a tendency to put real-life musicians (e.g. Phair and bands like Cracker and

Dale Peck is not known for understatement. His reviews, collected under the title Hatchet Jobs, earned him a reputation as one of the most scathing critics of his generation’s revered literary voices. Peck’s 1993 debut novel, Martin and John, was released as Fucking Martin in the UK. His 2009 YA book, Sprout, went on to earn him the Lambda Award for LGBT Young Adult Literature and was a finalist for the Stonewall Book Award. His forthcoming work of nonfiction, Visions and Revisions: Coming of Age in the Age of AIDS, recently landed on my doorstep as an advance review copy.