Hot Fruit
Orphanage origins, family objects, meals and fables shape lives built around beginnings that cannot be securely known.
Theme
The Body
Fiction about body image, physicality and self-perception — novels in which the body becomes a site of control, resistance and desire
Reviews filed under this theme.
Exhibition
A photographer watches her own images sell as a dead woman's self-portraits. The question is which of them made the work.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
A year of pharmaceutical sleep staged as transformation, ending in confirmation that conscious life happens to other people.
Elena Knows
A mother crosses Buenos Aires after her daughter is found dead in a church belfry, certain that rain proves what the police refuse to see.
Women Without Men
A compressed feminist fable set around 1950s Iran, where women leave male authority and find freedom taking stranger, unfinished forms.
1984
Orwell’s novel is strongest where control appears through objects, rooms and procedures. Its final section weakens when explanation overtakes experience.
The Land in Winter
During the winter of 1962–63, four people try to keep marriages, animals, patients and unborn children alive after the terms of their lives have begun to fail.
Nerve Damage
A possible sighting of the man who stalked her reorganises one woman's life around vigilance, repetition and misrecognition.
On the Calculation of Volume IV
A house fills with people who remember a day that does not move. They cook, repair, and organise their time, but nothing carries beyond use.
Of Cattle and Men
A slaughter system absorbs labour, appetite and waste, processing even catastrophe back into order.
The End of Eddy
The gay male child is singled out before he is self-knowing. The body is read publicly, then disciplined, and identity arrives after accusation.
Bath Haus
A man survives an attempted strangulation and withholds it from the partner who structures his life. Pressure builds through secrecy, recurrence and control until the system closes around him.