July 26th was a day like many others in Gaza. I woke up at 8:00 a.m. to fetch four gallons of potable water from the truck that would come every day to the school where my family and I had been displaced. After completing that daily mission, I was already exhausted. I . . .
In Issa Quincy’s debut novel, Absence, the unnamed narrator mythologizes a series of figuresthat he directly or indirectly encounters, including a disgraced teacher and the student he seduced and forever changed; a lonely bus driver in Boston; a disabled landlord who mourns the lesbian aunt his family abandoned; and other strangely compelling . . .
The bubbles of my words amuse him.He pokes them with a forward tentacleas they rise from my mouth. Biggerbubbles for longer words. I can feeland see rather than hear his giggling.See: yes. A tittering of the body,a gelatinous shake which assures mehe still likes me.—from Benjamin S. Grossberg’s “My Octopus Lover Is Easy . . .
