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.


May 2026 Featured Books:
1. Again, Harder by Alice Stoehr
2. Decomposition Book by Sara van Os
3. Acts of Resistance: Essential Essays, Archival Encounters, and New Poems by Cheryl Clarke
4. Charity and Sylvia by Tillie Walden
5. Theory for Moving Houses by Renee Gladman
6. The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, American Classics Edition by Nikki Giovanni
7. Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots
8. Vile Lady Villains by Danai Christopoulou
9. Being Aro: A Collection of Aromantic Fiction about Love, Connection, and Empowerment edited by Madeline Dyer and Rosiee Thor
10. Gender Ever After: A Gender Inclusive Sapphic Romance Anthology edited by S.B. Milne


Book descriptions:

Again, Harder by Alice Stoehr: Again, Harder gathers the uncompromising short fiction of Alice Stoehr, which investigates the inner lives, evolving relationships, and often violent marginalization of a community of trans women in a large Midwestern town.

In these stories, a commune of trans separatists seduces a suicidal writer. An obsessive TERF and the trans woman she’s fixated on circle one another with building, violent intensity. Polyamorous triads bloom and wilt, hookup app messages fly, friends sit for post-surgical care, and women fall to the toxic allure of Dorothy Lipko, the worst ex-girlfriend you have ever known.

Among this, there is regret, there is poverty, there is depression and sexual anxiety and despair; there is also fleeting, shared joy. Again, Harder is the sardonic heartbeat of a new generation of American trans women.

Decomposition Book by Sara van Os: An emotional, electrifying, and darkly hilarious debut about a woman who finds a dead body and can’t give up its ghost, for fans of Mona Awad, Yellowjackets, and weird girl fiction.

Spiraling from a disastrous falling-out with her best friend, Savannah retreats to her parents’ empty lake house in upstate New York to tend her wounds. Isolated and reeling from rejection, she spends her days in a fog, drinking and overthinking in equal worrisome measure. Until she wakes up one morning in the woods behind the house—next to a dead body.

Instead of calling the police, Savannah reads the journal she finds nearby, reliving the last desperate months of this woman’s life lost in the wilderness, fighting for survival. Ava, as it turns out, is more than just a cold, lonely corpse. She was funny. She was smart. And Savannah has finally found someone she can talk to. . .

As she pushes deeper into Ava’s harrowing story, Savannah notices a change, a shift in her reality. Each page brings her closer to the Ava from the journal. . . and the ghost before her now. Before long, Savannah feels something for Ava she hasn’t felt for anyone else—and there’s a good chance letting go would haunt her for the rest of her life.

Is Savannah finally losing her grip? Or has she found the friend she’s needed all along?

Acts of Resistance: Essential Essays, Archival Encounters, and New Poems by Cheryl Clarke: These times need urgently Cheryl Clarke and her brilliant mind and words. Clarke’s sharp, clear-eyed, forceful, and poetic essays offer readers both balm and provocation to action—and they continue to resonate in current political landscape. Clarke is a towering figure in the worlds of poetry, feminist and queer theory, and lesbian, feminist, and queer communities. She has been writing and thinking with and in her communities for over fifty years. Her work is prescient, classic, and timeless. Acts of Resistance gathers Clarke’s most beloved essays alongside archival finds and recent poems. Many of Clarke’s most influential essays, including “Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance” and “The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community,” first appeared in landmark publications such as This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981) and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983). These essays and others defined generations of lesbian, feminist, and queer thinkers, writers, and activists. Discover—or revisit—the inimitable Cheryl Clarke through Acts of Resistance.

Charity and Sylvia by Tillie Walden: An openly Lesbian couple survives and thrives in 19th century Vermont—a true story, as told by Tillie Walden

The month is February in the year 1807. The place is Weybridge, Vermont: small, cold, lonely, and beautiful. Sylvia Drake is exhausted. As an unwed woman with few prospects, she is residing with and caring for her sister’s rambunctious family. Today the house is abuzz awaiting a guest—Charity Bryant. A friend of the family, she is most known for her elegant letters, with their swoopy and evocative penmanship and carefully chosen prose. But Charity’s visit is a guise, she is coming to Vermont to start over after heartbreak and rumours—so many rumours—that have grown too loud back in Massachusetts.

Being openly gay in 19th century New England is not an easy row to hoe. But Charity can only be herself, and she immediately catches—and holds—the eye of none other than Sylvia Drake. From this point on, for 44 years, the two would be inseparable, building a life together despite all odds and living as a lesbian couple in small town Vermont.

The true, exceptional story of these remarkable women is brought to life with humor and passion by the unparalleled and award-winning Tillie Walden (Spinning, On A Sunbeam). We see America grow alongside these women over a period that brings about the railroad, many novels, 14 Presidents, riots, rebellion, plagues, and poetry. Based on extensive archives of their writing, Charity and Sylvia is a groundbreaking biography that is also the story of 19th century America.

Theory for Moving Houses by Renee Gladman: You are asking me where I live and it’s making me think all these things about space, where I start and end in space and where space starts and ends in me and when, in space, I am a body and when I’m a book, in space.

So begins Renee Gladman’s Theory for Moving Houses, and with these lines we are invited into a liminal space of imagination and investigation, as Gladman guides us through the architectures of her poetics. Foundational here is a sense of fluidity, a slippage of time, a devotion to “non-linear and hyper gestural movement,” a communal spirit. Gladman’s inquiry into her intersecting practices of writing and drawing reveals a deep commitment to uncertainty and “fictional knowing.” Yet again, Gladman upends traditional expectations of prose, as she leads us through landscape of her Ravicka series novels, ultimately surprising us with a novel within nonfiction. The latest volume in Wave’s Bagley Wright Lecture Series, Theory for Moving Houses is not only visionary in its contemplations but also is a virtuosic example of the ways in which language can shape utopian sites of possibility.

The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, American Classics Edition by Nikki Giovanni: From one of America’s most cherished and celebrated poets, a landmark collection of Nikki Giovanni’s early work from the transformational years of 1968-1998!

“Nikki Giovanni is one of our national treasures.” —Gloria Naylor

In celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, HarperCollins is proud to present this library of American classics drawn from our storied catalog. This timeless classic brings readers Nikki Giovanni’s poems from her books Black Feeling Black Talk; Black Judgement; Re: Creation; My House; The Women and the Men; Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day; and Those Who Ride the Night Winds.

When Nikki Giovanni’s poems first emerged during the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, she immediately took a place among the most celebrated and controversial artists of our time. More than 50 years later, Giovanni still stands as one of the most commanding, luminous voices to grace America’s political and poetic landscape.

Stirring, provocative, and resonant, these poems heralded the arrival of an indelible literary voice that resounds to this day.

Villain by Natalie Zina Walschots: The Boys meets Assistant to the Villain in the electrifying, sharp, violent, and hilarious sequel to the highly acclaimed novel, Hench. Filled with a queer and neurodiverse cast, Villain asks the question: what happens when a diabolically brilliant henchperson looks back at their already storied career and thinks, I can be so much worse.

The hench once called Anna, now known to her colleagues and enemies as the Auditor, has carved out a wicked name for herself. Any superhero unlucky enough to cross her path knows her potential and powers. Surely, her recent success should taste sweet: she has an incredible job with lots of perks, her boss will literally annihilate anyone who crosses her, and her greatest enemy, the former hero Supercollider, has been utterly defeated—literally ground to a still-living pulp.

But the Auditor still has her sights set on a greater work: destroying The Draft, the organization that makes, trains, and manages the world’s most powerful superheroes. These “heroes” have shown time and time again that they do more harm than good (she has the spreadsheets to prove it), and now is the time to stop the damage at its source.

Yet all is not well for the Auditor and her fellow evildoers. Her employer, Leviathan—the world’s most feared supervillain—is not coping well with Supercollider’s defeat at someone else’s hands. As their relationship deepens, her work-life balance increasingly involves navigating the feelings of someone who doesn’t believe they have any. Moreover, her unlikely ally and unexpected friend, Quantum Entanglement, has reappeared, forcing the Auditor to confront all the ways they deceived each other. Tension and uncertainty haunt the Auditor, and the fear that their triumph is about to crumble looms over all of them.

The Auditor soon finds herself facing down an opponent unlike any she’s taken on before—not another superhero, but someone like her, someone much more dangerous: The Draft’s Chief Marketing Officer. Their conflict isn’t a test of physical prowess, but ideas, and as their fight escalates, she'll need more than preternatural pattern recognition, data analysis, and a horrific imagination to meet this challenge. It’s guerrilla ad warfare, and the Auditor might have finally met her match.

Vile Lady Villains by Danai Christopoulou: With the consequences of her murderous actions closing in, Lady Macbeth turns to the three witches for help, who give her a potion that transports her to an unknown realm. Desperately lost, she opens a door and comes face to face with a beautiful woman drenched in blood.

Klytemnestra, Queen of Mycenae, is exacting bloody vengeance on her husband. Yet as she revels in her triumph, an otherworldly door appears and a strange woman steps in. Thinking this stranger a spirit, she chases Lady Macbeth into the realm of stories.

Hunted by screaming wraiths into worlds that are hell bent on their demise, this murderous pair are forced to form an alliance or perish. Yet the realm’s goddess, The Mistress of the House of Books, claims to hold the key to saving them. As every threat brings our vile lady villains closer, turning ill intentions into fiery attraction that no author dare write, they have a choice: remain within the confines of their original tales. . . Or burn down the world to pen a new story together. . .

Being Aro: A Collection of Aromantic Fiction about Love, Connection, and Empowerment edited by Madeline Dyer and Rosiee Thor: Explore expansive aromantic love and connection in stories across genres

These twelve stories showcase aromantic people breaking generational curses, finding acceptance, and protecting the vulnerable while highlighting the infinite ways people find connection and love without romance.

A high school matchmaker learns a lesson about love. A rebellious spaceship pilot defies his culture’s compulsory coupling. A boy magically transforms banned romance novels into living dragons. A teen immune to romance, and the zombie virus, fights to survive the apocalypse. Being Aro is full of stories throughout real and imagined worlds that cross genres and disrupt the status quo.

Gender Ever After: A Gender Inclusive Sapphic Romance Anthology edited by S.B. Milne: Gender Ever After is a sapphic romance anthology that revels in the full spectrum of gender expression, identity, and desire. Within these pages, love stories bloom between sapphic people of every kind—cis, trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid, two-spirit, agender, demigender, and more—offering a kaleidoscope of possibility, passion, and joy.

From sweet slow burns to fiery erotic encounters, these stories celebrate romance that is gender-affirming, sex-positive, and deeply sapphic. Characters find first love and rekindled sparks, navigate open relationships and lifelong commitments, overcome challenges, and write their own happily ever afters.

Brimming with heat, heart, and hope, Gender Ever After is about being brave enough to love and be loved, exactly as you are.