A haunting and deeply grounded depiction of mob violence, at once graphic and understated.

A bruising spotlight on COVID through the eyes of a character on society’s margins.

There’s a great bond between the domestic cleaner of a child’s feces and the child, and a harrowing disposability too.

Grapples with the painful immigrant contradictions of alienating yourself from family for their own economic sake.

A speculative thrill ride about the torment of obstinate “lovers” and the allure of new worlds ripe for reinvention.

One of the most vulnerable first date narratives I’ve encountered in short fiction, so stirring in its intense honesty.

Distills a lifetime’s worth of repressed longings and unloved bodies into a singular moment at a morgue. Embeds a precise melancholy.

It pulls you into a smoky day full of flames, houses burning, an entire world abandoned…and the beauty of what you choose to preserve.

Anxiety made palpable, ordinary household items convincingly transformed into fatalistic harbingers. A fearful ode to motherhood.

Fearless prose; an original African display of brave love and inspiring rebellion; an exciting reversal of maddening power dynamics. Multilayered.

The kind of gripping, devastating folklore I could imagine my mother narrating to me on a starry, moonlit night.

A near-psychedelic stream-of-consciousness piece that provokes warm desire for luxuriating in a moment with the person you love.

Aside from speaking to my inner math nerd, this made me long for a stubborn and accepting and intimate romance. Still does.

Young love quickly dissolves into horror. The weight of dissolution carries through to a red-tinged climax I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

I’m a sucker for toxic, treacherous love (in fiction…mostly), and this delivers in spades. The worst things for us are often all we need.

Mines dignity, power and mythology from a very dark era of Nigerian history. A deft example of fiction’s transformative power.

Startling moments of horror underscore the impulse and rawness of rage, its capacity to burn even those you hold most dear.

Present: blood between legs, shame and insults, indignity. Also present: the panacea of the mind’s vivid and hopeful wandering.

There are scarier things than Halloween mazes. Desires you’re too young to have. And intentions from others that sit on the unknowable edge between innocuous and nefarious.

Grief pieces abound, but this one here carves out its loss with enough beauty and specificity and freshness that it echoes within me.

An affecting portrait of distance between newly weds culminates in a powerful last sentence full of such implication. It lingers.

Draws you in from its tragic first sentence and barrels you alongside its defeated lovers to a sickening conclusion. Loss distorts. And sometimes, the tunnel never ends.