Second Place

There was nothing stable, no actual truth in all the universe, save the immutable one, that nothing exists except what one creates for oneself. To realise this is to bid a last and lonely farewell to dreams.

Aptly titled as such to both mean the place in the novel and also the theme of inferiority/insecurity in oneself, in particular, from being a woman wanting to be free and to be seen, and thinking that the only way for that is through the eyes of men, sets out to do so only to find out that she does not have a place in that world at all. An exploration of art, truth, self, womanhood, male privilege, and more. Short but impressively dense in what it is able to say and not say. This is as literary as literary fiction can get.