“She and I will never fully be able to understand each other but I do still love her, and that is how I came to tell you this story now.”

Set among high school music students and opera fanatics in Vienna, Sophie Strohmeier’s All Girls Be Mine Alone spins a tale of obsessions, monsters, and romantic conquest.

An unnamed lesbian narrates the demise of her friendship with her high school classmate, Joachim, and their rivalry over his girlfriend. She then recalls an anecdote overheard years earlier, when a former opera singer confides her own haunting memories from her time studying at the renowned Mikhail Glinka Conservatory. In a crowded dormitory late one night, a group of student singers accidentally conjures the spirit of an excommunicated monk living in agony over the tragic death of his beloved. When one of the students becomes convinced that she has been possessed by the monk, she discovers a new sexual appetite. Together, the two narratives form a single fugue of memory and eroticism.

Marked by hypnotic precision and frank humor, All Girls Be Mine Alone is an inventive and deeply felt novella of queer awakening, artistic fixation, and the strange intimacy of rivalry.

SOPHIE STROHMEIER is a bilingual writer and translator from Vienna, Austria. She is the author of one novel in German, Küss mich, Libussa (edition a, 2013). Her English-language writing has appeared in Apofenie, Joyland Magazine, The Missouri Review, and The Kenyon Review. She lives and works in New York City.