Alia Spartz

[SJP Lit; 2026] Tr. from the Japanese by Polly Barton; Charlotte Goff There was no guidance around which freshly translated novel by Japanese writer Nao-Cola Yamazaki (they/them) to read first. I was told that these books could be read as a unit, a pair, or separate, one indifferent towards the other. I don’t read book jackets or summaries before starting a novel.

It’s a given now that the five stages of grief don’t really exist. Or maybe they exist, but not in the linear fashion in which they’ve been marketed for years. Often, grief is much wider of a force, much less predictable. It stretches and constricts and then balloons again, larger than before, larger than ever, and swallows you, only to spit you back up as a different person in a new form. And that cycle, the swallowing and the emerging, continues over and over again.

A friend recently described marriage to me as a gamble, an investment made at a specific moment in time. We get married despite knowing who our long-term selves will be—what they may need or what they may want. In Erin Somer’s newest novel The Ten Year AffairCora, the protagonist, meets Sam at a baby group. In their small, idyllic town in upstate New York, she watches his mouth.