Wild Shrew Literary Review (WSLR) is Sinister Wisdom’s online book review project. To complement the longer list of suggested books available for review, each month we feature a selection of books being released that month. If you would like to write a review, or if you would like to be added to the WSLR email list to receive the monthly complete book list with book descriptions, please email the WSLR editor, Chloe Berger, at chloe at sinisterwisdom dot org.


September 2025 Featured Books:
1. Beings by Ilana Masad
2. Radical Family: Trailblazing Lesbian Moms Tell Their Stories edited by Margaret Mooney
3. What Rides at Night: Queer, Feminist, Fantastical Bicycle Halloween Stories edited by Summer Jewel Keown and Elly Blue
4. Cannon by Lee Lai
5. What a Fish Looks Like by Syr Hayati Beker
6. Caramelle & Carmilla by Jewelle Gomez and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
7. In Your Head by Alicia Vane
8. Catherine Opie: Genre / Gender / Portraiture edited by Adriano Pedrosa and Guilherme Giufrida
9. Traceable Relation by Kimberly Alidio
10. Self-Romancing by L Scully


Book descriptions:

Beings by Ilana Masad: In 1961, an interracial couple drove through the dark mountains of New Hampshire when a mysterious light began to follow them. Years later, through hypnosis, they recalled an unbelievable brush with extraterrestrial life. Unintentionally, a genre was born: the alien abduction narrative.

In Ilana Masad’s Beings, the couple’s experience serves as one part of a trio of intertwined threads: Known only by their roles as husband and wife, Masad explores the pair’s trauma and its aftermath and questions what it means to accept the impossible. In the second thread, letters penned by a budding science-fiction writer, Phyllis, to her beloved, Rosa, expose the raw ache of queer yearning, loneliness, and alienation in the repressive 1960s—as well as the joy of finding community. In the present day, a reclusive and chronically ill Archivist attempts to understand a strange forgotten childhood encounter while descending into obsession over both Phyllis's letters and the testimony of the first alien abductees.

Over the course of a decade, Phyllis wrestles with her desires and ambitions as a lesbian writer, while the abducted couple grapple with how to maintain control of their narrative. All the while, the archive shatters and reforms, redefining fact and fiction via the stories left behind by the abductees, Phyllis, and the Archivist themself. Masad makes human what is alien and makes tangible what is hidden—sometimes by chance and sometimes intentionally—in the archive.

Radical Family: Trailblazing Lesbian Moms Tell Their Stories edited by Margaret Mooney: A powerful collection of personal essays from lesbian moms who fought for the right to raise children 

For generations, lesbians across the United States were systematically denied opportunities to raise children and build families, opportunities that were readily available to heterosexuals. Radical Family honors the history-making struggles and triumphs of lesbian families in Madison, Wisconsin, who raised children in the 1980s, ’90s, and early 2000s—a time when lesbian motherhood was widely considered extreme and unnatural. In a collection of nine profoundly personal essays, the contributors recount their diverse paths to parenthood, as well as the hopes and challenges each family experienced. While the stories in Radical Family are unique, they all share a common thread: the mothers’ resilience and the risks they took, both small and sweeping, to defend their family’s right to exist.

For lesbians, the desire to raise children has historically been met with vilification and legal and social prejudice. Adoption agencies consistently rejected applications from out lesbians. Doctors and clinics refused to provide fertility treatments and other medical options to help them get pregnant. Lesbians who were able to raise children commonly lost custody to estranged spouses or grandparents.

Trailblazing lesbian mothers—and their children—fought to defy and, ultimately, shift this paradigm. Lesbian parents, like those in Radical Family, created informal networks in their local communities, where they could share survival strategies and find acceptance among other families that looked like theirs. With no rule book to guide them, and few laws to protect them, lesbian mothers created a new—some might even say radical—standard for what it means to be a family.

Over and over, the stories in Radical Family show how families fought back against hatred and homophobia with love, resilience, commitment, and creativity. Their stories deepen our understanding of what it means to be a mother—while showing how safety, belonging, and acceptance are universal human needs. 

What Rides at Night: Queer, Feminist, Fantastical Bicycle Halloween Stories edited by Summer Jewel Keown and Elly Blue: When the veil thins, the bicycle revolution rises. Thirteen new, original, spooky stories for the thirteenth volume in the series! Gather ’round, ghoulfriends, and peer into this enchanting collection of ghost stories, tall tales, and feminist fictions simmering with cyclist power. This monster mashup of thirteen queer and quirky stories grants us a glimpse into the world beyond this one, where community, creativity, and bike culture reign—a world where DIY zombies start a monster zine collective to fight their oppression by “normals,” time moves backwards as bones are covered again with flesh, cryptids defend fellow outcasts from bullying, and teen crushes take an otherwordly (though not unwelcome!) turn. Whether shared with your feminist book club, passed around the Halloween house show, or read alone on a dark and stormy night, each story is a spell, reanimating the land of the living with more fun, imagination, and bike rides. Featuring original stories from Elly Bangs, Jessie Kwak, Nell Hanson, Mildred Locke, Kortney Nash, Dawn Vogel, N. Anaar, Erin Cullen, Grace Desmarais, Kay Hanifen, Siri Caldwell, Summer Jewel Keown, and Valerie Hunter.

Cannon by Lee Lai: A Lambda Award winner and breakout fiction sensation returns with a darkly funny slice of friendship strife

We arrive to wreckage—a restaurant smashed to rubble, with tables and chairs upended riotously. Under the swampy nighttime cover of a Montreal heat-wave, this is where we meet our protagonist, Cannon, dripping in little beads of regret sweat. She was supposed to be closing the restaurant for the night, but instead, well, she destroyed it. The mess feels a bit like a horror-scape—not unlike the horror films Cannon and her best friend, Trish, watch together. Cooking dinner and digging into deep cuts of Australian horror films on their scheduled weekly hangs has become the glue in their rote relationship. In high school, they were each other’s lifeline—two queer second-generation Chinese nerds trapped in the suburbs. Now, on the uncool side of their twenties, the essentialness of one another feels harder to pin down.

Yet, when our stoic and unbendingly well-behaved Cannon finds herself—very uncharacteristically—surrounded by smashed plates, it is Trish who shows up to pull her the hell outta there.

In Cannon, Lee Lai’s much anticipated follow-up to the critically-acclaimed and award-winning Stone Fruit, the full palette of a nervous breakdown is just a slice of what Lai has on offer. As Cannon’s shoulders bend under the weight of an aging Gung-gung and an avoidant mother, Lai’s sharp sense of humor and sensitive eye produce a story that will hit readers with a smash.

What a Fish Looks Like by Syr Hayati Beker: What are the stories we need to survive?

In ten days, the last spaceship is leaving for a new planet. Some of us will stay on Earth. How do we decide?
#TeamEarth. Once upon a time, the oceans were full of fish and the forests dark with brambles. Seb read about it in a book of fairy tales, and memory means hope.

#TeamShip. Adaptation means knowing when to walk away. Jay is ready. So their ex, Seb, shows up on the dance floor, T-minus-10. What’s the harm in one last dance?

What if the stories themselves are evolving?

Told in margin notes, posters, letters scrawled on napkins, and six retellings of classic fairy tales, What A Fish Looks Like gathers the stories of a queer community co-creating one another through the strange landscapes of climate change, wondering who is going to love us when there are not, in fact, plenty of fish in the sea.

And now this book belongs to you.

Caramelle & Carmilla by Jewelle Gomez and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu: Two vampire stories, two authors, two striking meditations on dependency and desire.

For readers of Octavia E. Butler, Tananarive Due, and Gwendolyn Christie, comes Caramelle, Jewelle Gomez’s latest addition to the universe of The Gilda Stories. This short story offers a supernatural alternate history where vampires seek love, laughter, and blood in 1860s slavery America.

Inspired by a glimpse of affection in Joseph Le Fanu’s 1872 classic vampire novella Carmilla, Caramelle follows two vampires who arrive at a way station on the Underground Railroad not to stalk their prey but to seek sanctuary, intertwining the haunting legacy of American slavery with gothic horror and the resilience of Black women.

In Carmilla, included here alongside Caramelle, Le Fanu serves the sensual, sapphic, and spooky packaged into the experience of girlhood in 19th Century Austria. This original vampire story predates Dracula and introduces the genre as reliant on themes of gender, sexuality, and race.

Gomez’s foreword deftly links the two works by exploring the historical and cultural contexts that surround these two powerful iterations of the vampire genre.

“As in the past we still hold our freedom and our pleasure in our own strong hands. Hands made even stronger when holding on to the hands of others.” —Jewelle Gomez

Caramelle & Carmilla is the first book in the new series Aunt Lute Colloquy, a publishing space dedicated to fostering feminist conversations across literary generations.

In Your Head by Alicia Vane: A spicy sapphic novella for fans of Black Mirror, Women (Chloé Caldwell) and Want (Gillian Anderson).

Natalie Harris is a 29-year-old Psychologist who isn’t getting enough.

She hasn’t been on a date in years. Her appetite is non-existent. Even her creative hobbies have lost their appeal.

So, when Natalie’s best friend, Rhea, invites her to take part in a clandestine research project, the Vie Lab, she accepts, hoping to broaden her horizons.

What Rhea doesn’t reveal is that the lab allows testers to be virtually immersed in any scenario they can imagine. And that most scenarios are sexual.

Ellen, the lab’s beautiful and enigmatic Engineer, draws Natalie into her world, offering space to explore her desires. Orchestrating hands-on scenarios outside of lab hours. Rekindling her dormant appetites.

But as the edges of their relationship start to blur, Natalie wonders whether Ellen will let her get close enough to experience what she truly wants.

Or if she’s just another experiment in the lab.

Catherine Opie: Genre / Gender / Portraiture edited by Adriano Pedrosa and Guilherme Giufrida: Nearly four decades of work from the photographer who redefined the expression of gender in contemporary queer portraiture

A leading voice in contemporary photography, Catherine Opie has been known for her portraits of the queer scene in California since the late 1980s. A fundamental element of Opie’s work is the observation of different gender performances through a critical revision of the genre of portraiture. Her photography emphasizes how portraiture has the power to both reinforce and deconstruct conventional and binary expressions of gender. The title of this publication and the MASP exhibition it accompanies is based on the double meaning of the word gênero in Portuguese, meaning both “gender” and “genre.”

For her first solo show in Brazil, Opie enters into dialogue with the tradition of the portrait—a way of representing the human figure that dates to the 15th century in the West—producing an archive of diverse presentations of gender and sexuality. Around 60 photographs from her most iconic series are displayed alongside a selection of around 15 emblematic portraits from MASP’s collection. Strongly marked by figuration and the formal constraint of portraiture, the juxtaposition of these works accentuates the dialogues, tensions and reformulations that Opie’s photographic oeuvre proposes.

Traceable Relation by Kimberly Alidio: A collection of linked essays and poems concerned with the vitality of art and writing in the wake of grief. At the intersections of poetry, sonic/visual text, nonfiction, and arts writing, Traceable Relation portrays a writer’s practice within a lineage of aesthetic and practical sensibilities conveyed in the personal effects of her late father and the concrete tasks of communal mourning. In her ongoing practice of “speaking nearby” various works of film, sound installation and pop music, innovative, contemporary writing emerges from the diasporic arts of memory and survivance.

Self-Romancing by L Scully: Poetry bursting with intimacy and giddy charm.

In a tonal mash-up of Jenny Holzer’s Truisms, confessional poetry, and fortune telling, Self-Romancing draws you into the amorous and obsessive inner life of an unnamed romantic. Relatable and snarky, heartfelt and horny, L Scully fortifies irony with vulnerability, bringing readers into a narrative as intimate as slumber parties and ordinary as Trader Joe’s. Bursting with the giddy charm of the everyday, Self-Romancing plays with form, turning a book into a crush, a crank call, a manifesto.