At the start of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos, a woman is asked by a man whether she will attend his funeral. She consents, but when he passes away months later, she does not make it to the event. She knows, though, exactly which songs will be played—which Mozart concerto, Goldberg Variation, and Chopin piece. Ads interrupt…

Laura MacDonald, librarian and genealogist, is in the hospital undergoing treatment for breast cancer when she becomes absorbed in a cold case centered on the discovery, made by hikers in New Mexico’s remote Gila National Forest some thirty years before, of barrels containing the bodies of an unidentified woman and two girls. Solving this decades-old…

In 1887, three men disappeared while attempting to reach the North Pole by hot air balloon; thirty years later their remains are found on a bleak, frozen island along with rusted canisters contain photographic film. Some is undamaged enough by its three-decade-long incarceration in ice to allow experts at the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology…

Tackling the large and small issues of the day through a series of notebook entries and letters, Hope for the Worst, Kate Brandt’s lyrical debut novel, offers many finely cut gems while showing how a young woman develops from a passive observer to a full participant in her own life. An idealistic and naïve young…

A novel about memory and its loss, Dislocations by Sylvia Molloy is written in short chapters that feel as though they were taken from a daily journal. It is possible they were. According to the jacket copy, Dislocations is a work of fiction. But the narrator’s friend and central concern, a woman named M.L. who…

“What would it be like to step into the waters of somewhere beyond the stars?” asks one character from Chloe N. Clark’s Patterns of Orbit. Meshing genre elements from speculative, horror, and science fiction, the twenty-five stories in the collection repeatedly pose this question, exploring what it means to be uncertain, what it means to…

In a class on the novel, my teacher, the writer Douglas Glover, wrote in large letters across the blackboard: The Novel is a Poem. Rejecting the idea that the novel reflects reality only in its plot and characters, Glover  (following his own teacher, Robert Day) contends that the novel additionally operates according to “patterns” that…

Fanfiction is having a moment. Anne Hathaway is set to star in a film derived from a Harry Styles fanfic. Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis initially shipped characters from Star Wars. And, of course, the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey series came into the world as Twilight fanfic. Yet despite its indisputable success and…

The tale is as old as the ocean itself: a love affair at the beach with a mysterious man seemingly born from the waves. Sea, sand, sex, and struggle too—these are the concerns of Australian writer Madelaine Lucas’s debut novel, Thirst for Salt. The book opens with an unnamed narrator looking at an online photo…

Published in 1952 after being serialized in a weekly magazine, Alba de Céspedes’s Quaderno Proibito made waves at midcentury for putting a lens to female subjectivity. Ann Goldstein’s new English translation has reinvigorated the novel for contemporary readers and restored de Céspedes, once one of Italy’s most successful authors, to the spotlight. And rightly so:…

“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,…

Margot, the famous daughter of punk rock royalty, is fleeing her turbulent, and very public, New York City life for the quiet serenity of Montana. Reeling from an emotionally-abusive relationship with a much older man known only as The Director, the narrator begins her story in an airplane bathroom, blood dripping from a self-inflicted wound…