From the beloved Women’s Prize shortlisted author of Dominicana comes a new novel set in 2008 about a fifty-six-year-old Dominican-American woman who has lost everything, including her beloved, estranged son, and is fighting to get it all back again.
HOW NOT TO DROWN IN A GLASS OF WATER
by Angie Cruz
Flatiron/St. Martin’s Press, September 2022
Lulu Sanchez Pena and Cara Romera became friends soon after Cara’s son Fernando ran away. The mystery of why he ran away and the search to find him is central to their lives. When the two women are laid off from the factory where they work, the financial impacts are devastating; and when Cara unexpectedly dies and Fernando reappears, Lulu must question his intentions. Told from Lulu’s point of view, and with Cara’s voice coming through in a recorded transcript of a job interview, this is a novel that asks the reader not to accept the story as fact but to piece it together themselves. Much like gossip that vexes and catches a person in the way it spins and invents, Lulu and Cara spin tales about themselves assembling a memory of their lives and community. With its themes of immigration, aging, LGBTQ+ acceptance, and female friendship, this is a timely novel from a powerful literary voice.
Angie Cruz is the author of the novels Soledad; Let It Rain Coffee, a finalist in 2007 for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and Dominicana, winner of the YALSA Alex Award, shortlisted for the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, Longlisted for an Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. She has published short fiction and essays in magazines and journals, including The New York Times, VQR, and Gulf Coast Literary Journal. She has received numerous grants and residencies including the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, Yaddo, and The Macdowell Colony. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of Aster(ix), a literary and arts journal, and is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh.
Patch feels out of place at Mountford College: she wears the wrong clothes, she’s on a scholarship, and she has an embarrassingly persistent crush on Evie Vanhoutte, popular girl and golden child. Evie has no idea Patch exists until one day, a chance encounter sparks a friendship that’s equal parts exhilarating, terrifying, and very, very confusing.
The nine stories in Morgan Thomas’s shimmering debut collection MANYWHERE witness Southern queer and genderqueer characters determined to find themselves reflected in the annals of history, at whatever cost. As each character traces deceit and violence through tall tales and their own pasts, their journeys reveal the porous boundaries of body, land, and history, and the sometimes ruthless awakenings of self-discovery.
On an early-April dawn in 2003, in a Portland hospital far from the Rummani family’s ancestral home in Palestine, a stillborn baby girl comes back to life and turns a vibrant cobalt blue. On the same day, the Rumanni’s beloved soap factory in Nablus is destroyed in a bombing. To Nuha, the girl’s great-aunt, there’s no question that this inexplicable child somehow embodies their sacred family history, when the Rummanis were among the wealthiest soap-makers and their blue soap was a symbol of a famous, unlikely love.
In the vein of Carmen Maria Machado, Kelly Link, and Daniel Lavery, and born of the author’s experience in and between genders, these stories blur the line between fantasy and reality, between the lives we wish for and the ones we actually lead, excavating new meanings from our varied dysphorias. Ranging from a tornado survivor grappling with a new identity, to a trans teen psychic that can only read undecided minds, from a woman telling her family of her plans to upload her consciousness and abandon her body, to con artists, runaways, and lost souls returning home, Blue’s characters all share an insistence on forging their own realities. Surreal, darkly funny, and always tender, PRETEND IT’S MY BODY is a collection bound together by the act of searching – for a story of one’s own, for a glimpse of certainty, and for a spark of recognition in others.