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.


July 2026 Featured Books:
1. The Pure and the Impure by Colette, translated by Rachel Careau
2. Perverts by Mac Crane
3. A Fate Worse Than Drowning by Sarah L. Hawthorn
4. Real Sugar is Hard to Find: Stories by Sim Kern
5. All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning by s.e. smith
6. The Brides by Charlotte Cross
7. Why Aren't You Dead Yet? edited by Ella T. Holmes
8. With My Own Hand: The secret life of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s sixteenth-century Sappho by Ashley Douglas


Book descriptions:

The Pure and the Impure by Colette, translated by Rachel Careau: Journey through the sexual underworld of Belle Époque Paris in the first new English translation of Colette’s masterpiece in nearly sixty years.

Lyrical, allusive, sometimes obscure, yet precise, The Pure and the Impure has elicited equal parts consternation and praise since its publication nearly 100 years ago. Through strikingly vivid and evocative portraits, many of them of her friends and lovers, Colette explores varieties of sexual expression, gender identity, love, and sensual pleasure. Decades ahead of its time in contemplating queerness and women’s sexuality, The Pure and the Impure provides a fascinating window into the various demimondes of the Parisian Belle Époque: We meet cross-dressing lesbians, a sapphic poet, Don Juans male and female, and Colette’s onetime lover who might today be a transgender man. At the same time, the book offers a unique portrait of a complex and often contradictory character—Colette herself. The “brilliantly ingenious” (Lydia Davis) translator Rachel Careau offers readers an elegant and highly readable rendition that reproduces Colette’s extraordinary musicality, making her “perfect, lapidary and truth-bearing sentences” (Terry Castle) sing for English readers.

Perverts by Mac Crane: A full-frontal confrontation of the ways we perform desire and shame—from the downright bizarre to the frighteningly relatable—by the award-winning author of A Sharp Endless Need

An employee at a hunting ground where people pay to act out hate crimes prepares to meet their girlfriend’s parents for the first time. A self-destructive client engages in an affair with their therapist, careening their relationship toward its inevitable breaking point. At a theme park where men pay to ogle women dressed as sirens, a mild-mannered boat attendant gets engaged to the star performer. And in the title story, a pregnant internet sex worker blackmails her clients into attending a disastrous party.

Nothing is off limits for Mac Crane as they rework classic stories of rejection, isolation, and connection to suggest that the so-called pervert, by existing in the margins of society, may be the one who sees the world most clearly. Crane brings their keen eye for the unsavory to seventeen transgressive stories that are as tantalizing and addictive as the characters’ experiences. A provocative and uproarious collection about pleasure, performance, and pain, Perverts is an exaltation of the awesome depravity of queer modernity.

A Fate Worse Than Drowning by Sarah L. Hawthorn: One deal with the devil makes a fool. Two? A villain . . .

A year ago, Elle made a deal with the devil to save her sister. Now, they live on a desolate spit of land beyond Halifax harbor. Elle, as lighthouse keeper, steers unsuspecting sailors to their destruction; those are the terms of her bargain. Liney need never know the cost. Her safety is worth every drop of blood.

But a sinner’s pact is not so simple. When the devil returns, demanding more—more shipwrecks, no survivors—Elle knows what she must do to keep Liney safe . . .

Another ship. Another crew killed in the devil’s name.

Then a woman washes ashore. Is she a soul to be sacrificed, or part of a darker design? As Liney and the stranger grow closer, Elle faces an impossible choice: kill, and break Liney’s heart, or forfeit her own soul.

Danger arises from all sides: the merciless sea, ruthless men on the mainland, and the infernal bargain itself . . .

Souls and sisterhood, fate and fire—what must be sacrificed for the devil to get his due?

Real Sugar is Hard to Find: Stories by Sim Kern: A collection of short stories by New York Times bestselling author, Sim Kern, Real Sugar is Hard to Find explores intersections of climate change, reproductive justice, queer identities, and family trauma.

Whether fantasy, science fiction, or terrifyingly close-to-home, the worlds of these stories are inhabited by flawed characters whose lives are profoundly impacted by climate change and environmental degradation.

Arranged in a progression from dystopian to utopian worlds, the stories chart a path from climate despair towards resilience and revolutionary optimism. Even in the bleakest of futures, however, Kern offers reasons to hope, connect, and keep fighting for a better world.

Like Kelly Link’s Magic for Beginners or Karen Russell’s Vampires in the Lemon Grove, Kern’s stories are unflinching, intimate explorations of trauma and our deepest fears, rendered irresistible through the infusion of fantastic speculative elements and a dark sense of humor.

All My Dead Cats and Other Losses: Practicing Good Grief in a Culture That Fears Mourning by s.e. smith: Have you suffered a loss? How was your life changed by the grief you experienced? Did you feel like your grief was properly acknowledged? Mourning is a personal experience and shouldn't be judged. There are no do-overs in death, but there are do-betters.

All My Dead Cats is not a book about pet loss. You will meet award-winning journalist and debut author s.e. smith’s cats and read small slices of their stories. Their vignettes serve as an opening to scary conversations about loss, so grief can feel less intimidating and more relatable.

This is a book about grief and mourning as collective activities best undertaken in community. S.e. interviews dozens of experts—from death doulas to funeral home directors to therapists and psychologists—and discusses the different stages of grief. The shared perspectives help us understand that grief is not fixable but it can be livable. They teach us that if we have the courage, which begins with honest conversations about how we navigate grief, then we can learn how to do better.

Grief is not over once the body is neatly disposed of, the rubble of the house has been taken away in dumpsters, the final fit on the prosthesis is done, the law is passed and withstands legal challenges, or when the permanent peace is brokered. It is an ongoing shift in our relationship to the world, and one that deserves attention and care as well as time and space to be amongst fellow mourners, to whom we do not need to justify or explain, because they understand where we are.

Readers will feel seen rather than being chastised for how they grieve and better understand how to process mourning—and how to help others. All My Dead Cats provides an entry point, by beginning the conversation about a beloved pet, so readers can think about the larger stakes of death and live a more fulfilled life.

The Brides by Charlotte Cross: Creepy, sumptuous and incredibly gripping, The Brides is a feminist gothic horror about the three women who became the brides of Dracula—and the fourth who managed to escape . . .

“Come to me, and be mine for eternity.”

1884. When Mafalda journeys to Budapest to care for her grieving aunt, her secret love, Lucy, hurries from London to comfort her, with chaperone and lady’s maid in tow.

But lady’s maid Alice, blessed and cursed with the Sight, is tormented by terrifying visions. When chaperone Eliza falls prey to a disturbing wasting illness, the women hope to seek the healing waters of Transylvania. At a nobleman’s invitation, they set out for Castle Dracula.

In the depths of the forest, miles from civilization, their host reveals his true intentions; a monstrous ambition which will tear the women apart.

And not all of them will survive.

Why Aren't You Dead Yet? edited by Ella T. Holmes: A woman donates her fat for money. A woman must buy hormones in secret. A young man survives surgery when he wasn’t meant to.

Sixteen disabled and chronically ill authors challenge our ideas of who is allowed to survive the end of the world in stories that are by turns visceral, heartbreaking, romantic, and at times, gooey. From deeply speculative to almost too real, these stories not only twist dystopian tropes and narratives on their head, but actually let disabled characters live.

From editor Ella T. Holmes who brought us the Amazon Bestselling Artifice & Access anthology, comes this heart pounding disability in dystopian anthology. Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? continues the project of uplifting some of the most marginalised voices in publishing.

While Artifice & Access boldly proclaimed “we belong!” This time we’re screaming “you can’t get rid of us!”

With My Own Hand: The secret life of Marie Maitland, Scotland’s sixteenth-century Sappho by Ashley Douglas: The youngest of the Maitland siblings, Marie had watched her elder sisters be married off one by one, destined to take up the unavoidable path for women in sixteenth-century Scotland. However, as she neared marrying age, her father, an influential judge, poet and Keeper of the Privy Seal under Mary, Queen of Scots, went blind and suddenly needed someone to act as his scribe and secretary. In taking up this role, Marie indeed avoided the unavoidable, dedicating her life to her father’s work. After his death, she put the finishing touches on the Maitland Quarto, long recognised as significant for its preservation of the poetry of the male great-and-good of sixteenth-century Scotland.

A rare feat for a woman at the time, but Marie’s story doesn't stop there. For hidden in the pages of the Maitland Quarto, historian and translator Ashley Douglas discovered Marie’s own secret lesbian love poetry. Penning such poetry in the hostile climate of post-Reformation Scotland, with its suffocating tightening of moral control over society, was an incredible act of bravery. Unable to sign it directly, Marie, insistent on her voice and love being known, littered the manuscript with clues to its true penmanship. Clues that, until now, have remained unseen.

Building on her initial discovery of Marie’s poetry, in With My Own Hand Ashley Douglas draws on a vast range of newly unearthed primary historical records to tell the fascinating story of Marie and her manuscript, in full, for the very first time.