End of the Month: March
Lousy Smarch Weather Edition
OLIVIA:
Read: While I do have a few perfect reading experiences per year, I have never had a perfect romance-reading experience and fear it’s not in the cards. This month had solid attempts, even still: Alexandra Romanoff’s Big Fan (recommended to me via The Ringer’s Jam Session, months ago–fast and fun), A C Robinson’s Hardly Strangers (featuring an intriguing blurb from past Juncture-interviewee, Fariha Róisín), and (of course) Emily Henry’s shortly forthcoming Great Big Beautiful Life.
Other reads in March: a return to parts of Mircea Cărtărescu’s Solenoid and Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume (Book 1) after the announcement of their intl Booker longlisting, Greta Rainbow’s article on marketing seriousness in Dirt, Remy Jungerman’s Tracing the Lines: Patterns from the African Diaspora, plus Bricks from the Kiln #7, and The Resonant Frequencies of Buildings. These last three were shipped to me via tenderbooks, a shop in London I love and have never been to. (I think I’ve said that before in the Juncture. Lately I’ve also been returning to previous months' write-ups, which is a strange experience, always feels as if I’m visiting a previous version of myself that is separate from the reader I am now). And from Colorama in Berlin, have just received The Swirl by Sarah Böttcher.
And and and: I read passages from various books at kimya: a reading + listening room. While I took photos of many pages and paragraphs to later return to, I did not take photos of any of their covers, and will have to do some investigative work piecing together their sources for further exploration.
Listened: The Kingston Symphony’s The Great Outdoors. I have an antagonistic relationship with string instruments that was healed a bit, here.
Saw: Opus (2025)! Season 5 of Fargo! This latest season of Severance, which I have burned myself out of discussing! And my beloved The Pitt. I love you, The Pitt. <3
Since this is my last monthly wrap up for the Juncture I’m allowing myself to write a goodbye: goodbye! Thank you x1000 to our visitors who shared in cool books with me, those who challenged me to expand my reading horizons, and all the artists who trusted our store to carry their artwork & zines.
And also a very belated thank you to Cleo, who started these monthly wrap ups–I have loved writing them very much. (You can catch some of Cleo’s work as part of Queer Multiples, on view at Art Metropole’s new exhibition space on College until May 11!)
CHARLOTTE:
Read: Very little, but with an emphasis on the end times. Post-climate-apocalypse has been the foundation of my fiction these past few months, including Ali Smith’s Gliff (who I hadn’t read before) and The Unworthy by Augustina Bazterrica (a novel I keep seeing described as splatterpunk and which I describe to others as “something I like to read but wouldn’t be able to watch in a movie”). The Bazterrica is more cathartic because of all the martyrism, or maybe I just loved Tender is the Flesh and Nineteen Claws and a Blackbird and knew what to expect (I think it's the martyrism).
Listened: To the same old songs, but mostly Bruce Springsteen and Lana Del Rey (Henry! Come home!).
Saw: A bunch of things! I rewatched many romcoms (Crossing Delancey and Chilly Scenes of Winter by Joan Micklin Silver and Down With Love (2003) most ecstatically), got into a bit of Mai Zetterling (The Girls and Night Games), and paid varying amounts of money to see disappointing new releases such as Holland from Mimi Cave (I LOVED her film Fresh in 2022 and upon every viewing since, but this was a cheerful little flop, like a pilot for a TV show you’ll never tune into again), Mickey 17 from Bong Joon Ho (Cheerful! Floppish…), and Adolescence by someonewhoseworkIwilllikelynotexploreanyfurther (not cheerful, and even if I’m the only person on the internet who feels this way, a total flop).
JESS:
Read: Arabic, Between Love and War (2024), a poetry anthology from trace press, edited by Yasmine Haj and Norah Alkharashi (I highly encourage you to read our interview with founder and director Nuzhat Abbas if you haven’t already!), The Love Lyric by Kristina Forest, and as of today, I am starting Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism by Ariella Azoulay (I will try to write about this for next month's wrap-up!).
Listened: I’ve been almost exclusively listening to Congolese rumba for my recent residency at Whippersnapper Gallery. Outside of that, I’ve been enjoying Deftones, specifically their more ethereal, shoegaze-y songs (“Be Quiet and Drive (Far Away)” has been on repeat!) and for better or for worse, I’ve been relistening to Future’s DS2 (2015).
Saw: Compensation (1999) (a new-to-me favourite!), Black Bag (2025), and I started watching The O.C. for the first time. Adam Brody hive, rise!
LUKE:
Read: Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali. I picked up a copy while in London recently and got to read it while in Berlin. It follows Raif, a shy young Turkish man who moves to Berlin in the 1920’s to learn about soap manufacturing, his father’s trade. He becomes captivated with a portrait of a woman, and then with the artist herself – a connection which will alter his life completely. It’s a romantic and melancholic novel and a strange bestseller in its native Turkey (and now abroad) decades after its publication in 1943. It’s certainly moving, and I wonder if anyone makes it out without crying, but it’s beautiful in its depth of feeling too. An easy decision for my Staff Pick.
Listened: Been repeatedly listening to Kelela’s In the Blue Light, a live album from a 2024 performance at the Blue Note Jazz Club in NYC. It’s easy to love all her virtuosic unplugged performances from across her catalogue, but I’ve particularly been drawn to her rendition of Waitin’. She enlisted the harpist Ahya Simone to sparkle in the back, which makes for a magical and ethereal sound and brings to mind a legacy of great jazz harp performers such as Dorothy Ashby and Alice Coltrane.
Saw: I finally took the time to watch Clarice Lispector’s only televised interview (and the only footage she ended up leaving behind for us, dying later that same year). Notoriously elusive about interviews at all, it’s a fascinating and enigmatic look into one of Brazil’s most important writers. Reading her work has been my foray into reading more deeply into Brazilian literature, introducing me to Hilda Hilst, Caio Fernando Abreu, Victor Heringer. A new collection of her stories is out now, Covert Joy, the cover flashing from a metallic magenta to teal with her mysterious gaze reflecting out at us.
BILLY:
Read: Stag Dance, Torrey Peters’s second book after Detransition Baby. I grabbed this the day it came out and read it faster than I’ve read anything in recent history. Just as eviscerating and surprising as her first novel, this book expands on her style with a lean into genre. I’m still seeing scenes from each of its short stories and the titular novel in my head on replay.
I’ve also been reading Amateur from Thomas Page McBee. Published in 2018, it is the memoir or a trans man who gets into boxing in order to reconcile his new relationship to masculinity with the so-called “crisis of masculinity” that was newly hitting its stride. In 2025, this shape of this “crisis” now looks dramatically different, but I’m still finding his insights incredibly valuable.
Listened: I checked out the short series from Vox’s podcasts Unexplainable and Future Perfect, The Good Robot. Host Julia Longoria, previously a regular on Radiolab, investigates the world of AI ethics. I really wanted to like the series and was hopeful it would give me new things to think on. Unfortunately, it fell a little flat for me, especially towards the end. But! It does include some of the most digestible (and repeatable/teachable) explanations of the mechanisms of generative AI, as well as the relationship between AI tech bros and the philosophy of effective altruism that I’ve encountered so far. I would recommend the first two episodes if you’re curious, and then you can probably ignore the rest.
Saw: The Second City has just opened its new revue, Duel Citizens, and I’m a big fan! It’s snappy, bold, and relevant without being so on-the-nose political that it ruins the escapism. Also everyone is wearing baggy 90s jeans that I’m really really jealous of.
CASON:
Read: When I was in the UK earlier this month (humblebrag), I stumbled across a copy of Lynn Tillman’s debut novella Weird Fucks. Originally published in 1978 and reissued a few years ago by Peninsula Press, the novella follows an unnamed narrator as she blunders her way through a series of uncomfortable erotic entanglements. Tillman’s voice is idiosyncratic and sharp, full of punchy quips and playful non-sequiturs. I read the entire book in a single sitting on the ride to the airport, then read it again on the plane. Now I’m reading Thrilled to Death, a new collection of Tillman’s work that includes several chapters from Weird Fucks repurposed as short stories. Cerebral, silly, and strange, Tillman’s short stories twist language and narrative in inventive ways, often arriving at surprising emotional insights. As Christine Smallwood writes in the book’s introduction: “Tillman reminds us that playing with words, collecting and rearranging their meanings, is a pursuit of the heart.”
Listened: I spent most of this month listening to Mayhem, the latest album by the Italian-American superstar Stephanie Germanotta, otherwise known as Lady Gaga. As a gay man of a certain age, I was raised by Gaga, and so I’m primed to defend her even when the music sounds like shit. Luckily for me, Mayhem is actually pretty good. Standout tracks include the Nine-Inch-Nails-inspired “Perfect Celebrity”, the Prince-inspired “Killah”, and the Michael Jackson-inspired “Shadow of a Man”. Paws up, little monsters!
JOSH:
Read: I absolutely love the forthcoming release from the small UK press And Other Stories: Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi from the Kannada language. Heart Lamp explores feminism, gender, caste, class, religion, resistance, and the patriarchy in Muslim communities in Southern India. In the titular story, a woman in the throes of postpartum depression douses herself in kerosene. In an attempt to stop her self-immolation, her infant child is placed at her feet. Similarly affecting, the book concludes in prayer, in which the narrator asks: “Be a woman once, oh Lord!” These stories took Mustaq 33 years to write, and at 76 years old, she’s being collected in English for the first time.
Listened: Was immensely grateful to have been gifted two tickets to The National Ballet’s production of Swan Lake. Russian ballets reside in the top tier of music I love. My six-year-old spent the whole first act incessantly asking “where’s the black swan?” (At her natural request, we both went dressed in head-to-toe black)
Saw: Billy Wilder’s film noirs Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Wilder, I’m pained to admit, is a new discovery for me. But these film noirs are every bit as quality, if not more perfect, than his comedies Some Like It Hot (1959) & The Apartment (1960). It’s a comfort to learn I haven’t lost the ability to be floored.
MAX:
Read: Why Don’t You Love Me by Paul Rainey starts off like Blondie or Family Circus, young parents Claire and Mark ending their fights with cutesy one liners. But something darker and unreal starts puncturing their lives and they cope via meanness, alcoholism, and hate. Can they find their way back to love in the face of the world’s end? A heartbreaking and uplifting examination of a couple's straining under worldwide catastrophe. In hardcover in 2023, it felt like the perfect book to look back on existing through COVID. Now brand-new in paperback, how can it be that it's the perfect book for a world that can seem even worse off?
Listened: Back in the early-2000s wake of Rounders, I remember World Poker Tour videos being all about dramatic hands soundtracked by high octane commentary. Today the algorithm is feeding me six-hour long videos of every hand, no matter how undramatic, the commentators more like the low hum of golf play-by-play. This is the ASMR that I often fall asleep to these days: cards wisping over green felt, hefty plastic poker chips shuffled into towers, the players unmic’d, their nerdy table talk barely decipherable.
Saw: I rewatched Avengers Infinity War because I’m writing about the Thanos movies for the upcoming superhero-themed issue of Film Fvckers. My initial unformed idea: the Thanos saga centered around the death of half the universe, yet when COVID happened and it actually felt like half the universe was dying, the MCU movies weren’t up to the task of examining real-life grief and that’s why no one gives a shit about the MCU anymore. I’d forgotten how much fun these dumb movies used to be, the speed of the banter, the charm of its actors. So a further unformed idea is emerging: how when I originally watched Infinity War, it evoked a nostalgia in me for the comics I’d read in the 90s and how re-watching now evokes a secondary nostalgia for the 2010s when the MCU made up a lot of my life.