Melissa Broder

Bottoming out after a dramatic breakup, doctoral student Lucy accepts her sister's invitation to dog-sit at her home on Venice Beach for the summer, where she meets an eerily attractive swimmer whose Sirenic identity transforms her understanding of what real love looks like.

"Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on subsisting--until her therapist encourages her to take a ninety-day communication detox from her mother, who raised...

"Superdoom: Selected Poems brings together the best of Broder's three cult out-of-print poetry collections-When You Say One Thing but Mean Your Mother, Meat Heart, and Scarecrone-as well as her fourth collection, Last Sext. Embracing the sacred and the profane, often simultaneously, Broder gazes into the abyss and at the human body, but with both humor and heartbreak, lust and terror. Broder's language is entirely her own, marked both by brutal strangeness...

""Are fairies real?" a young girl asks her father. As the two walk through a forest that is magical enough to help us all believe, they tell one another a fairy tale he's been building for her for a long time: Moomjean the fairy battles General Crag of the Trelfs to protect the fairy lands of Ripple Grove. Father and daughter finish their hike and return home, full of magic and wonder of both the forest and the fairies."--