Pirkko Saisio is huge in Finland. The writer, director, and actress rivals Touko Laaksonen (Tom of Finland) as a national queer icon and has been honored in her homeland with numerous awards. With the rolling publication of her Helsinki trilogy in English translations, Two Lines Press is giving English-reading audiences a substantial introduction to Saisio’s work. Lowest Common Denominator is the first novel in the autofictional trilogy, which continues with Backlight and concludes with The Red Book of Farewells. The fine English translations by Mia Spangenberg, with their attentive rendering of ungendered Finnish pronouns, are an elucidating expansion of the queer coming-of-age bookshelf.

Pre-recovery, pre-therapy, the young, queer characters in Bad Seed, Gabriel Carle’s first collection published in English, have not yet sorted out their passions. Their lives are messy; their stories can’t be neat. The geographic center of these eight stories is the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, specifically the theater steps, where Carle’s narrators and their friends— “the Bad Decision Club”—meet between classes.