Highlighting recently released and forthcoming works by marginalized creators

Common Life by Stéphane Bouquet and translated by Lindsay Turner

In three poems, one play, and three short stories, Stéphane Bouquet’s Common Life offers a lively, searching vision of contemporary life, politics, and sociality. At a moment at which the fabric of everyday social life is increasingly threatened across the globe, this book is a necessary exercise of the literary imagination: what, it asks, does it mean to inhabit the world together today?

The Way Back by Edward Gunawan

Blending intimately memoiristic prose with confrontational spoken-word poetics, Gunawan situates the intersectional specificity of an individual within a larger historical context to weave experiences of migration and mental wellness from a diasporic queer perspective. Foregrounding the power of solidarity and resilience in community, The Way Back converses with queer writers both living and dead, from Audre Lorde and James Baldwin to Yan Yi and Natalie Diaz. 

Confronting the legacy of inherited and inflicted traumas through direct and deceptively simple language, Gunawan’s hybrid collection navigates the choppy post-colonial cross-currents of identity, sexuality, and transnationality—as he invites all of us to chart our own true course back to self, to home, to love.

What Moves Through Time by Judith Werner

In What Moves Through Time by Judith Werner we experience tales of a woman’s emotional challenges as the narrator grows in love and spirituality while she moves through her time. In the final tale we learn, as Faye does, that only love can conquer death.

Do you have a lit journal issue, chapbook, book, or other work that’s about to be published? Email us at vagabondcityliterary@gmail.com to be added to our Books Available to Review list and featured on an upcoming Now Read This list.