To call prose cinematic is often to imply that its descriptions are heavily visual, focused on surfaces more than interiorities, and rich with sweeping panoramas, vivid colors, and dramatic action. Not here. While thoroughly cinematic, the forty-four stories in Terese Svoboda’s The Long Swim are shaped by techniques of the editing room more than the…

It is worth noting the absence of a question mark in the title of Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better. These stories do not ask sarcastically or bitterly why we feel entitled to feel better. Rather, the collection explores surprising moments that do offer a possibility of…

At its heart James Brubaker’s We Are Ghost Lit asks a simple question: What is grief for one lost life? Wrapped in cultural allusions, from Star Trek on the pop side to Borges on the literary, with a minimalist playlist for grief in the art-resisting mourning of Phil Elvrun, We Are Ghost Lit balances obsessively…

“At my funeral one of our friends will describe us as pure, blameless, holy children of the universe, but Lukas and I know, if our friends forget, that these words can be true of the two of us only if they are true of us all.” So says Jutta Carroll, the protagonist of The Martyrs,…

On August 6, 1945, the first nuclear bomb used in war destroyed Hiroshima, followed at Nagasaki three days later by the second. The first was code-named Little Boy, the second Fat Man. From this anthropomorphic nicknaming is born the pivotal conceit of Mike Meginnis’s poetically and morally luminous novel, Fat Man and Little Boy. After…

Beautiful Soon Enough is a slim collection of twenty-three stories, some as short as two pages, others somewhat longer, each a jewel in its own right, set to perfection in relation to the whole, and subtly accompanied by photographs and photo montages done by the author. As various as Margo Berdeshevsky’s characters are in age,…

Peter Tieryas Liu’s Bald New World displays inventiveness both wild and thorough in its creation of a dystopic future born of the inexplicable but world-changing event of the Great Baldification (twenty-five years before the present action everyone on the planet suddenly and permanently lost their hair). The novel takes us into the heart of a…

Catherine Gammon’s labyrinthine second novel Sorrow is expansive in its layers of perception, but also specific in its meanings. The word itself, sorrow, sounds like a slow process, something quiet and arching, but it implies a long-held sadness, and within that an arc of emotional action. The book delivers on this idea, pulling the reader through the grief of…