“The Flame in You” tells the story of Everett and Lucien, brothers in a Cameroonian immigrant family, throughout their childhood and teen years. Compared to Everett, Lucien fails to meet both Everett’s and his father’s rules, choosing instead to kindle his own flame. In “Flame,” Nabang explores how patriarchal expectations and zero-sum thinking strangle relationships between men. In her thoughtful and tender prose, Nabang beautifully illustrates the generational trauma of such abuse, and the legacy of loss it leaves behind.

—Avery Dame-Griff

Sacrificial Animals is a story about alienation and environmental harm, about the relentless brutality of rural white masculinity, about prejudice and patriarchy ripping families apart. It’s also about shapeshifting fox spirits who tear off men’s heads. What else do you want from a book?

The plot follows the Morrow family, a deeply repressed family of white men living in rural Nebraska, and their destruction at the hands of a fox spirit whose babies they killed. It’s impossible not to compare to Stephen Graham Jones’s The Only Good Indians, another story of human men committing hideous violence against female animals and their young, and being brutally punished for it. What sets the story apart is its exploration of Orientalism and the particular viciousness of white American men toward themselves, their children, and the more-than-human world.

Pedersen’s writing is superb and haunting. Vicious violence against children and animals is described in a dull, one-note, almost perfunctory manner, while a white man’s attraction to a Chinese woman is described with florid terror.

—Sophia Babai

The Sapling Cage centers on a young woman named Lorel who joins a coven of witches, hiding that she is transgender. Without giving too much away, what makes this story distinct in its gender exploration is how Lorel grapples with her gender identity in a world where magic exists. For Lorel, part of her journey is figuring out what she needs to feel safe and accepted (by herself and others) in her identity, and how or to what extent she needs magic to gain this sense of self-acceptance. The book also examines power, autonomy, community, and justice more broadly through Lorel’s evolving relationships with the coven members and the people she meets in her travels.

—Liz Haas

In “Scarlett,” Everdeen Mason offers a new telling of the classic Pygmalion and Galatea narrative to explore the associations between femininity, service, and ownership, as well as themes of selfhood and consent. In it, protagonist Jon strives to create the “perfect” AI Scarlett, allowing her to learn from observing his life. A story for the current moment, Mason’s sharply observed characterizations speak to how modern technological visions are driven by a desire to instantiate existing gender structures. As Scarlett’s knowledge of Jon and the world grows, her vision of her “perfect” self diverges from Jon’s vision. In the process, Jon’s frustration at Scarlett’s failure to achieve “correct” femininity speaks so vividly to the performative aspects of gender, and the story’s haunting ending highlights how the obsessive pursuit of perfection ultimately smothers all it touches.

—Avery Dame-Griff

Vanessa 5000 is a brilliant achievement in physical comedy. Courtney Pauroso draws from clowning tradition to create the character of a sex robot being presented at a tech convention. Through this character, Vanessa 5000 comments on the use of tech and mass data collection to enforce gender roles. Vanessa is just a little bit off, evocative of what a neural network might present when fed the entirety of the internet and trained on what an average tech bro perceives as sexy. Pauroso demonstrates remarkable precision in her portrayal of this character, which makes it all the more delightful when the tech presentation goes off the rails in the latter half of the show.

—Liz Haas