The Picture of Dorian Gray has all the trappings of the classic gay tragedy. The unrequited love of the tortured artist for the straight, upper class, charismatic jock who has everything but is also actually a massive douchebag. The story really isn’t about Dorian, but about the sorrow of the gay men who constantly fall in love with people like him. Literally a cautionary tale Favorite line: “every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion. It is not he who is revealed by the painter; it is rather the painter who, on the coloured canvas, reveals himself.” Rating: 4/5

Girl, Woman, Other speaks to many of my own ambivalence about the personal and political of identity. Scholars tell us identities are constructed. We know, in theory, that in challenging forms of othering we ought to resist the urge to engage in othering ourselves. Yet, as Linda Martín Alcoff reminds us, our identities - race, ethnicity, gender - however constructed, are lived and experienced as real. Challenging our current racialisms, genderisms, and culturalisms must begin, then, with an empathy for how identities are lived. Evaristo’s observational, biting, and humorous account is just such a starting point. Favorite line: “Megan was part Ethiopian, part African-American, part Malawian, and part English which felt weird when you broke it down like that because essentially she was just a complete human being” Rating: 4/5

We The Animals vividly evokes that moment in your childhood when anything and everything could be imagined. Curtains, ketchup, spanish rice, body heat; all could become fantasy for the three working class boys who inhabit the story. Ma and Paps, however, carry their own brokenness, and Torres masterfully captures how that produces so much uncertainty and tension in boys who have not learnt how to articulate those feelings. At any moment, a picture of joy could descend into a beating. The story is presented in poignant and beautiful episodes, almost as if the narrator is searching through his memory. My only gripe is that the ending came too abruptly. Favorite line: “When it was cold, we fought over blankets until the cloth tore down the middle. When it was really cold, when our breath came out in frosty clouds, Manny crawled into bed with Joel and me. “Body heat,” he said. “Body heat,” we agreed. We wanted more flesh, more blood, more warmth.” Rating: 4/5