Portland Diary: Short Stories 2016/2017

A collection of seven stories about women faced with impossible situations. Each narrative unfolds its heightened, speculative version of the everyday reality we find ourselves in as racialized people, queer and mentally ill and colonial subjects, enemies or collaborators to the Western imperial machine, disposable labor for a capitalist system that is devouring the world. In “Mansion,” the story that opens the book, an unpaid intern falls into a nightmare after realizing how little she’s worth to the local Human Rights Campaign-esque nonprofit she’s been sacrificing herself for. And the book progresses through dystopian futures, ecastatic visions of liberation, narrow escapes, and betrayals until the last story, “Waiting Room,” where a trans woman and an android woman form a bond while waiting for the surgery consults that promise to bring them a measure of freedom.