An animal in the road that’s been run-over or someone passed out on the sidewalk in broad daylight—there are things that most people can’t help but stare at as they pass. And then there are the less blatant temptations: the curtain half pulled back on the bedroom window of that one house on the block;…

Is it wrong to deny a woman her entrée into adult sexuality? Is it abuse to have sex with a willing partner who is 17 years old? What about 16? What about 14? Cris Mazza never lets the reader off the hook in this entertaining but deeply unsettling novel about women’s changing sexual lives and…

It isn’t every day one comes across a novel of guerilla warfare, anti-globalization style, set in a picturesque Italian village, a novel that also involves a detailed family saga and a complicated love story. Filippo Bologna’s How I Lost the War, translated from Italian by Howard Curtis and published this year by Pushkin Press, is…

Fabric is a difficult book to write about. This is not because it is a difficult book. So this is how we will begin: There are five sections in Fabric. The form of the book exists in the nospace between prose and sometimes poetry. There is a list of characters: Alfred, Dorothy Gale, Jackie Robinson,…

Literary journals are like photographs—snapshots of a particular moment and a specific literary scene. By chronicling the work of a great number of writers in each issue and with every new edition, journals catalog trends and narrative voices as well as the development of new themes and innovative perspectives. They demonstrate how language, either by…

A collection by its very nature requires cohesion, a controlling idea, or at least a consistent style of writing, to link unique pieces. Any departures from that theme—no matter how tolerant it may intend to be—must be purposeful departures, each a worthy variation. The trouble with Robert Levin’s collection When Pacino’s Hot, I’m Hot is…

A book is a kind of country, a landscape conceived and constructed by an author out of words and images and ideas. Usually, but not always, there are people moving about this created landscape, inhabiting their country, and the book is, in that sense, a framework for their story. Whatever it is. Whatever shape it…

Reading Abbott Awaits, Chris Bachelder’s third novel, felt eerily familiar at times, like reading the inside of my head. The book follows its titular character—first or last name, we don’t know—one single-day chapter at a time through his summer break from teaching at a state university, during which he watches his two year-old daughter, awaits…

In disarmingly straightforward prose, translated from the German by Michael Hofman, Peter Stamm’s Seven Years is an unpretentious meditation on the subtle tenacity of unhappiness. Stamm isn’t interested in catastrophic events, but rather, the little hurts and betrayals, inescapable weaknesses and patchy mendings. He presents this collection of minor failures through a story of the…

Unlike many writers who write the same story over and over, Grandbois’ first two books have been radically different. His third book, Nahoonkara, follows the pattern. It’s a pensive cacophony of personalities and perception. It’s part western and part magical realism—think Gabriel Garcia L’Amour—and part Native American Spirit Journey framed by the ramblings of a…

Valerie Trueblood’s book of short stories, Marry or Burn, makes substantial demands on its readers’ attention, for which they are repaid manifold. Unlike the seven non-consecutive chapters of Trueblood’s Seven Loves (Little, Brown and Co., 2006), these twelve stories, as a whole or even separately, do not concern a central character and his or her…

The “linked stories” in Gregory Sherl’s collection, I Have Touched You, actually lie somewhere between confessional thought fragment and prose poetry, but they come together to create a mosaic of Sherl’s vision of contemporary intimacy in shades of gray. Gray because the voice of Sherl’s narrator comes to the reader from within his own private…