In Ukraine's port city of Odessa, residents have recently found themselves hiding not from the thunder of rocket attacks but from the whir of buzzing Iranian drones in the sky. The machines have been playing an important role since Russia invaded seven months ago -- forming part of reconnaissance operations, missile firings or bomb drops. Awakened with a start on Saturday morning by a roar from the sky, Maryna Kondratieva ran to hide in the cellar with her two young children, fearing the worst. "I understand now that everything can change in five minutes," Kondratieva, who lives in a well-to-do part of the city and whose terrace overlooks the Black Sea, told AFP. Odessa -- the'capital' of the southwest and Ukraine's main port -- had seemed largely safe from Moscow, whose troops failed to take it at the beginning of the war.

If you spend time around transgender people, you may notice, on badges and buttons, on sewn patches, or even as a tattoo, the sigil "T4T," or "t4t." The characters stand for "trans for trans," and the usage began as shorthand on dating sites. Imogen Binnie's "Nevada" might be, in that extended, contentious sense, the first t4t novel. Published in 2013 by the trans-focussed (and now defunct) Topside Press, and just reissued by the mainstream trade publisher Farrar, Straus & Giroux, "Nevada" is hardly the first novel about trans characters, or the first by a trans author for the queer community--Leslie Feinberg got there in 1993, with "Stone Butch Blues." Still, "Nevada" seemed to be the first book-length realist novel about trans women, in American English, with an ISBN on it, that was not only written by one of us but written for us.