UNL Creative Writing alum SJ Sindu reads from her new collection of stories, THE GOTH HOUSE EXPERIMENT. In “Dark Academia and the Lesbian Masterdoc,” a millennial English professor facing mounting personal crises puts her energies into TikTok, but her newfound viral fame could wreck her already unstable life. In “Patriots’; Day,” a man trying to leave his marriage for the woman he loves finds himself caught up in larger currents of anti-Asian violence. In other stories, an array of loners and artists—a young poet haunted by the ghost of Oscar Wilde, a queer beer brewer, a boy with wings—struggle for connection and fulfillment in a world battered by the pandemic and reactionary politics.

SJ Sindu is a Tamil diaspora author of two literary novels (MARRIAGE OF A THOUSAND LIES, which won the Publishing Triangle Edmund White Award and BLUE-SKINNED GODS, which was an Indie Next Pick and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award), the graphic novel SHAKTI, and other works. She is the co-editor of Zero Street Fiction, the LGBTQ+ fiction series of the University of Nebraska Press.