Lucas Stoffel

Book Review: On grief, witness, and the perilous tenderness of loving another person without trying to reorganize their soul in “Boy, Refracted At Wat Xieng Thong after rain, a solitary figure, a phone, and the Tree of Life hold the book’s central tension in one suspended image: grief on the verge of becoming witness, fracture, and form. Most novels about AI ask whether a machine can feel. “Boy, Refracted” asks a nastier question: what does it look like when love arrives as

Dustin Thao's When Haru Was Here is his sophomore novel after You've Reached Sam, which was already proof that this author understands loneliness the way some writers understand plot or dialogue. It's his native language. And in When Haru Was Here, he's become even more fluent in it.

The Emperor of Gladness Book Review: I thought I knew what Ocean Vuong would do next. After On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, I expected another poetic letter, another lyrical excavation of memory and loss. The Emperor of Gladness is not that. It's bigger. It's warmer. And it might be even better.

They Both Die at the End: The title tells you exactly what happens. They both die at the end. Adam Silvera puts that information right there on the cover, dares you to care anyway, and you do. You care so much it feels unfair.

"Red, White & Royal Blue" Book Review: I was not expecting this book to matter to me as much as it did. I picked it up thinking it would be a fun, frothy enemies-to-lovers romance between the First Son of the United States and the Prince of Wales, and it is that — it absolutely is that — but Casey McQuiston also wrote something that sneaks up on you and becomes genuinely moving in ways that the premise doesn't advertise.

"The Nightmare Before Kissmas" Book Review: Okay, here's the pitch: holidays are kingdoms. Christmas, Halloween, Easter — each one is ruled by a royal family. The Prince of Christmas is a golden-hearted himbo named Coal who's disillusioned with the whole Santa PR machine. The Prince of Halloween is a brooding, dark-magic-wielding disaster named Hex. They're rivals. Then they're not.

Different book, different rules. This one is not a memoir and it is not part of The Warboy Chronicles. The Stardust Pirates is a queer YA horror novel loosely inspired by Peter Pan, set on a Philippine island where the magic is ancient and the grief is fresh. I wrote it. Early readers on Goodreads and NetGalley had things to say. Here is what they said. The Stardust Pirates follows Jack, a teenager who has taken on far too much responsibility far too young, and his best fr

The Third Person is a memoir written entirely in third person. Yes, that sounds like a contradiction. It follows a version of me after a devastating breakup with the person I call Warboy, the end of a fifteen-year relationship that left me suspended somewhere between grief and motion. I rent out my New York apartment, lose my job, go home to Iowa for Christmas, and eventually do the thing heartbroken people do when standing still becomes unbearable: I leave. Vietnam. Thailand

Okay, this book. Ocean Vuong writes a letter to his mother, a mother who can't read English, and through that letter he unpacks everything. Immigration. War. Addiction. What it means to be queer in a family that doesn't have the language for it. Vuong is a poet first and you feel that on every page. Every single sentence feels intentional, like he carved each word out of something precious. This isn't someone writing prose who happens to be good with language. This is a po