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

Publishers Weekly gave it 9.50 out of 10. Kirkus called it exuberant. A picaresque memoir about daring to live an unlikely life in a society that punishes those who try.

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