The New Animals by Pip Adam is a secretly speculative novel that follows a multi-generational group of people through one manic night in Auckland. It’s 2016, and the group is attempting to put on a fashion photoshoot in less than twenty-four hours. Everything’s chaotic: hair needs cutting, sample clothes haven’t arrived, and budgets are questionable.…

Imagine your life like this, Sarah Layden urges her readers in this collection of stories—and we can, all too easily. The characters who inhabit this collection exhibit at once frailty and strength, wisdom and profound stupidity, cruelty and compassion. Theirs is a world that’s easy to recognise, universal and personal in the same breath. Layden’s…

In Days & Days & Days, anxieties of money are ever present; money haunts everything. Bibbs, a Swedish actress and celebrity famous for blogging and reality TV, lives a life of financial security with her boyfriend, Baby, who “didn’t have a degree and hadn’t gone to university, but each month he was paid the same…

About a quarter of the way through Emily Grandy’s gorgeously written and expertly plotted debut novel, Michikusa House, her protagonist Winona (Win) asks: “Why does art always have to be about suffering?” Grandy’s novel answers the question by enacting another type of art. As the book opens, Win is a college nutrition major in recovery…

For its play with text and genres, its multiple female narrators, and its autobiographical underpinnings, A Book, Untitled, by Shushan Avagyan and its translator Deanna Cachoian-Schanz, might best be considered a thought experiment along the lines of Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee. While recalling the metafictional tendencies of much Western postmodern fiction, it also evokes…

Getting old is not for the faint of heart. You are no longer young in looks or temperament, and if you continue to engage in the indiscretions of your twenties, you become a cautionary tale: the sad, middle-aged person who’s desperate to regain the flame of youth. Whatever choices you’ve made, good or bad, have…

Nghiem Tran’s debut novella, We’re Safe When We’re Alone, opens with a straightforward premise: “I have lived in the mansion my whole life. I was born here. I have never left.” The narrator, simply named Son, lives in the mansion with Father. Father leaves each morning for work, traveling to an undisclosed location for an…

Late in her novel The Long Form, Kate Briggs quotes the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin: “There is never any problem, ever, which can be confined within a single framework.” Briggs’ novel is an architectural masterpiece that takes Bakhtin’s point as its premise; it is a novel that cannot be contained by any one form…

Mornington Hall, once a grand country estate, has fallen to ruin in a drought-stricken, dystopian English landscape. An earthquake has compromised the library’s storage system, and flooding from burst pipes has damaged the art collection. Many valuable artworks are sold to finance the repairs, including J.M.W. Turner’s A View on the Seine (1833), once the…

A family saga sweeping across seventy years through four generations of the Song family, Carol Roh Spaulding’s debut collection contains Whitmanesque multitudes. Starting with the family’s emigration to the U.S. in 1924, the collection comes full circle in 1997, when an aging Grace Song journeys with her lover and her seven-year-old grandson to the family’s…

In Snakes of St. Augustine, Ginger Pinholster’s second novel, qualities of acceptance, belief, and trust spur the novel’s beautifully drawn characters to survive—no, thrive—in seemingly impossible circumstance. This entertaining novel introduces readers to a cast of marginalized characters who navigate their lives with limited resources and without the security that comes from having had stable…

Shannon Bowring opens her debut, The Road to Dalton, by immersing readers directly in the loneliness of small town life. “Imagine this,” she writes. “You are driving along on a road in Northern Maine. Your head’s still humming from the monotonous drone of I-95 that empty highway. On the radio, nothing but static and outdated country…