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.


April 2026 Featured Books:
1. The Life of a Creature by Nadja Lubiw-Hazard
2. Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg
3. As a Lover by Hilary McCollum
4. Magdalena Is Brighter than You Think by Grace Spulak
5. The Way Disabled People Love Each Other by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
6. Meet Me in the Garden by Nina LaCour
7. The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own by Gwendolyn Kiste
8. Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach
9. Queenslander by Laura Garden
10. The Mystery of the Bitten Peach by Cecilia Tan


Book descriptions:

The Life of a Creature by Nadja Lubiw-Hazard: An astonishing debut story collection about the interconnection between humans and animals navigating love, loss, and healing

Creatures swim, slither, and soar their way through this stunning short story collection about the inextricable nature of humans and animals that celebrates and bears witness to our fellow creatures and to the complex emotional terrain of our own lives.

A woman’s personal trauma and anxiety are intertwined with the lives of the feral dogs abandoned in the Chernobyl exclusion zone. As a lesbian love affair unravels, the secrets of a gift-giving crow are revealed. The life of a veterinarian is told through the animals that she has loved and that she has tried to save. A dying man dreams of returning as a vulture after death. The loss of sea turtles on the brink of extinction weaves through a mother's devastation over the loss of a daughter.

Beautiful in its renderings of human experience, The Life of a Creature is a tender and haunting book imbued with the deeply sensory intimacies of the animal world.

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg: An electrifying collection of linked stories following a cast of characters navigating bodies, queerness, power, and sex—with radical results—from the bestselling author of Housemates.

With a brash and stylish voice that implicates and confronts the reader, Emma Copley Eisenberg wades into the contradictions, joys, and violence of a modern world shaped by looking and watching, examining how our hungers can both hijack and crack open our lives. In the title story, a young girl looks to a group of fat women at her local pool to teach her about her changing body. In “Swiffer Girl,” a woman agrees to try for a baby with her partner, only to suddenly find herself haunted by the viral sex video that made the rounds during high school—a video indelibly tied to her own sense of self. In other stories, an obscure fat makeup vlogger’s strange friendship with a middle schooler forces her to reflect on her past life at a toxic beauty startup, a boomer retiree tries to understand her nonbinary child’s gender and polyamory, and a trans librarian takes a job as assistant to a famous science fiction writer only to find himself screening hookups on his octogenarian employer’s behalf.

For better or for worse, these stories counsel, none of us can leave our bodies behind: they remind us what it is to be alive. As the characters in Fat Swim dance into and out of each other’s lives—and through and around Philadelphia—they seek connections and experiences that remind them of that fact, culminating in a reality-bending, tour de force finale, “Camp Sensation.” Eisenberg, whose fiction “should be studied by every contemporary author as the finest departure from the fatphobic hellscape of fiction that exists” (Electric Literature), has a singular vision, and Fat Swim is her most incisive and provocative work yet.

As a Lover by Hilary McCollum: London. 1928. For centuries, the establishment has suppressed public knowledge of lesbian love. Now, a celebrated writer is set to fight back.

Award-winning author, Radclyffe Hall, hopes her new novel, The Well of Loneliness, will transform attitudes to same-sex relationships. It soon comes under attack from the right-wing press, concerned about its potential impact on readers. One such reader is Maggie Dillon, a young trainee firefighter, who has been struggling with fears that she is an abomination after kissing another woman at a party. Can The Well transform Maggie’s views about herself and help her to find love? And will Radclyffe Hall keep her book in print long enough to radically change the views of society?

Magdalena Is Brighter than You Think by Grace Spulak: Inventive and emotionally nuanced, Grace Spulak’s debut story collection explores the complexities of gender, queerness, trauma, and resilience through characters who live in the margins and imagine new ways to survive there.

Pushing the boundaries of traditional narratives and forms, these stories suggest paths for picking up our pieces—and for transforming and escaping the realities that constrain us. A social worker becomes entangled in the life of a woman she’s meant to investigate, blurring the line between empathy and obsession. A veterinary student communes with a yak that seems to speak to her—if only she could understand its message. And a separating couple embarks on one last errand together to unburden themselves of an unsettling memento.

Backgrounded by the New Mexico landscape—a place of isolation, strange beauty, and potential transformation—this collection offers unexpected flashes of grace and hope.

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha: The latest poetry collection by the award-winning author of Tonguebreaker, Care Work, and The Future Is Disabled

Lambda Award-winning poet, memoirist, and disability justice movement worker Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha returns with their long-awaited fifth collection of poems, written over five years of pandemic lockdown, during which time they lost a cherished friend and comrade and met their estranged parents’ end of life.

The Way Disabled People Love Each Other is a fierce crip reckoning with all the ways disabled people love each other, in all our complexity. A book that will speak to any kind of griever, but particularly disabled BIPOC queer trans ones sitting with the endless mass grief and possibility of this time, and those with violent family from whom we still yearn to claw out beauty from the trauma rubble. It’s a road map for survivors looking for something that’s neither a happy Hollywood ending nor a transformative justice fairy tale—not the healing we wished for, but the healing we find anyway.

This collection is a rigorous, rueful documentation of a specific time of pandemic fascist grief and possibility. Brimming with odes, elegies, and mourning songs, these poems sparkle like switchblades and offer new possibilities for love, grief, and memory.

Meet Me in the Garden by Nina LaCour: From bestselling, award-winning author Nina LaCour comes a sweeping family saga about self-discovery and love in all forms, inspired by the author’s Creole roots

New Orleans, 1944. Odette has always been one of the Honore sisters, glamorous and admired in their Creole community. But while Odette’s older sisters are content to be wives and mothers, Odette has always wanted something else. It is only with her beloved cousin, Delphine, that Odette can tell her secret: she is in love with a woman, and she longs to be an artist. Delphine has a secret lover, too, a white man. In the hidden garden they’ve discovered, Odette and Delphine can dream of futures full of passion and freedom.

But five years later, Odette’s life is nothing like what she’d planned. She’s a widowed mother, living in Los Angeles, and she and Delphine, who is passing as white, have spiraled away from each other. When Delphine reaches a breaking point, Odette must make a shattering choice to try to hold her family together.

Profound and expansive, a story of love and longing, art and motherhood, friendship and desire, Meet Me in the Garden is a decades-spanning tour de force, inspired by the author’s family and tracing the history of the Great Migration.

The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own by Gwendolyn Kiste: Celebrated author Gwendolyn Kiste cordially invites you to explore The Haunted Houses She Calls Her Own. Enter a world possessed by recriminations from bygone eras, where the regrets and malice of years past still reverberate and shape our doom. Here, morally complex women and queer antiheroines swim against the current of a social structure that serves as a spectral prison in these layered stories of the weird and the Other.

Known for crafting bold metafictional narratives that grapple with challenging social issues, Kiste’s unwavering voice deftly weaves a siren’s song of resilience and survival. Included among the short stories in this collection are the Bram Stoker Award-winning “The Eight People Who Murdered Me (Excerpt From Lucy Westenra’s Diary),” “The Girls From the Horror Movie,” “The Sea Witch of the World’s Fair,” and other riveting new gothic tales of body horror, the supernatural, and unapologetic resistance.

Work to Do by Jules Wernersbach: When Eleanor founded Guadalupe Street Co-op in the early 1980s, she was in her mid-twenties and madly in love with her girlfriend, Meg. Together, they envisioned an idyllic grocery store owned by its workers and customers.

Forty years later, Guadalupe Street Co-op is an iconic Austin business with a loyal customer base, an antiquated business model, and a disgruntled staff. Roz, one of the store’s senior managers, is too caught up stalking her ex-wife online to notice that her girlfriend, Molly, is plotting with her coworkers to unionize. Roz also doesn’t see that Molly is not-so-secretly in a situationship with Randy, the dairy manager leading their collective.

Unfolding over the course of a single week during Texas hurricane season, Work to Do pings between the co-op’s first year and present day, as the unionization bid reaches fever pitch. The wind howls, the power goes out, and water creeps through the front door, as questions of who owns the grocery store and who has a right to its future are posed. And will the workers ever be paid enough to buy the organic groceries they shelve?

Queenslander by Laura Garden: Queenslander is a sweeping epic set on a farm in the Australian Outback.

Farms collect broken things. Things awaiting resurrection.

Since getting out of juvie, Ronnie Madonna has built a tentative life in Lionheart working as a farmhand for Nev at Upsend Downs, but one thing is still missing: her daughter Rainbow.

When she realizes she has a chance to get Rainbow back, she must prove she is a responsible adult and a good mother. Her quest will take a village, and will force her to confront demons from her past. Will she follow her football dreams to Brisbane or put down roots on the land that holds a mysterious power over her and her boss?

Ten years ago, jaded former war photographer Nev Bickerman woke to a pregnant teenager smashing the family room with a cricket bat. Now, Nev is far too professional to admit she’s falling in love.

Welcome to Lionheart, aka “Line Hat,” a small town between the Outback and the rainforest healing from colonial scars, where climate change threatens both agriculture and eco-tourism. Gritty and hilarious, with emotional momentum, Queenslander is the first book in this Australian family drama series.

The Mystery of the Bitten Peach Cecilia Tan: Meet Mei, a young Chinese American who has discovered she has the mystical ability to transport herself anywhere that is spiritually “China”—including Chinatowns around the world and different eras of Chinese history. As an adoptive child of the diaspora, Mei was raised in America with no knowledge of Chinese folklore or fairy tales, but when an antiques dealer friend needs help retrieving a mythic artifact—a jade carving of a peach that represented same-sex love in ancient China—she’s game to give it a try.

Her quest sends Mei not only into the past, but on a journey of self-discovery.