The eight stories in Patrick Michael Finn’s collection, From the Darkness Right Under Our Feet, are so thematically and stylistically cohesive they create a story collection that reads very much like a novel. These are not linked stories, not in the traditional sense; they do not share characters or even strict time periods. But they…

I’m nervous to talk about Vi Khi Nao’s The Vanishing Point of Desire. I feel self-conscious, like I need to protect my ideas from your derision, like I need to couch my reading experience through “I” in the event that I am totally, uselessly, wrong about everything you are about to read. Maybe this is…

Child narrators can be some of the most interesting narrators in fiction, in the sense that they are able to reflect and refract adult situations without completely understanding what is really going on. They have both a developing awareness, which makes them pay close attention to difficult situations, and an emergent morality, which means they…

In the opening story of Stacey Levine’s The Girl With Brown Fur, a family is moving to Uppsala. It’s a real word and a real place, yet it’s one that sounds strange and slightly fantastic to an Anglophone ear. Suspending her readers between the familiar and the foreign is what Levine does best, and each…

Meg Tuite’s new novel, Domestic Apparition, describes the life of a young woman named Michelle who navigates the mean streets, and meaner Catholic schools and dysfunctional homes, of a working-class American childhood. Michelle idolizes her intelligent but troubled older sister, survives the abusive rage of her father and the nuns who teach at her school,…

Beware! Things are not what they seem in Christopher Boucher’s How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive, out this summer from Melville House. Within the pages of this quirky yet delightfully thoughtful novel, we have a Volkswagen that is not only a car but the narrator’s son, we have Trees that steal hearts, ovens that striptease,…

For many, summer is a time of loosened schedules, and, for the first time in maybe a year, the luxury of spare hours. The extra minutes of sunlight call us to step outside into a garden, onto a balcony or porch, even a bench in a park…wherever, but we find these secret or not-so-secret spots…

Here’s the deal: we know from the publisher’s description of Unfinished, from interviews with Lily Hoang and the initial call for submissions on her blog, how this book came about. She asked writers to send her their “abandoned” stories. She would finish them. The authors of the abandoned and Hoang would edit them together or…

One Friday evening, sometime in the late 1980s, in mid-March in Moscow, an old woman goes missing. Alexandra Sergeyevna Pumpianskaya is the oldest resident among the eleven occupants of Apartment 12 and, technically, the remaining family member of the once-lavish apartment’s original owners. Pumpianskaya’s disappearance, itself precluded by a clever metafictional musing on literature and…

The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn by Sean Dixon is a marvelous, contemporary novel that subtly takes hold and improves as it ages, so that by the end, a fully realized tale has played out, encompassing the spectrums of dark and light, gentrification and urban blight, vengeance and forgiveness, upheaval and reconstruction, fire and water…

The stories in xTx’s collection Normally Special, published this year by the newly established Tiny Hardcore Press, can be divided into two categories, mostly on length, although that simple difference in word count also marks a diversity of voice and story complexity. This is not to say that the shorter stories in Normally Special are…

Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City begins with an epigraph from The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed: More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams. These are the unedited words “written” by Racter,…