In the title story of Emily Mitchell’s most recent collection, The Church of Divine Electricity, a young woman returns to the home of her parents, and her life, once troubled, seems back on track—that is, until she shows up with an eight-pointed star on her forehead that signifies her decision to volunteer for the transhuman…

Hidden River, a memorable novel-in-flash by Sara Lippmann, opens with 35-year-old Cassie, the narrator, receiving an overseas wedding invitation from Sally Sellers, with whom she’s been out of touch for many years. The Sellers family once offered Cassie the illusion of stability; it is unclear what they may offer her now. Though it is written…

In a remote Australian mountain forest there is a black orchid. It is the last of its species: an endling. As Keely Jobe’s debut novel The Endling begins, the orchid decides that “for the sake of its kind, it will hold on a little longer. It won’t flounder. It will remember the way the orchids…

At the start of Nice Places, Vincent Chu’s debut novel, twenty-something Georgie loses his job at a soulless corporation. Instead of coming clean about his lack of future plans, and despite having never gone anywhere on his own, Georgie tells his colleagues he is quitting to travel the world—and promptly starts an Instagram account to…

Winner of the 1955 Nobel Prize, Halldór Laxness wrote novels, essays, plays, and translations, and was a champion of Iceland, its history, and its people. In this novel, published in Icelandic in 1970, Laxness takes readers on a stroll through Icelandic history, a history with few documents and populated by invisible men and women.

Susanna Crossman’s novel, The Orange Notebooks, is a compelling study of grief’s many colors.

Joan Silber’s novel In the City opens with a deeply familiar gesture: a teenage girl leaves home to assimilate herself into a romanticized bohemian subculture. Pauline, a Jewish girl from Newark, possesses the boldness and vanity one might expect of a young woman who wants nothing less than the admiration and attachment of “a circle…

After years of working on media stories about hotly contested political situations, I’ve learned that sometimes telling the truth about a situation will make people mad. As I read Khanh Ha’s “The Afterlife of a Threadbare Jester,” a harrowing tale of political imprisonment in communist Vietnam, I wondered if the author got any hate mail.…

In one of my favorite stories in Lim Sunwoo’s collection, With the Heart of a Ghost, a woman turns into a ghost for one hundred hours after suddenly dying. Those are the rules of the universe as told to her by a pigeon, allowing her extra time to say goodbye. She asks the pigeon how…

What becomes of awful people? The Angolan-Portuguese writer Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’sThree Stories of Forgetting, sensitively translated from the Portuguese by Alison Entrekin, offers one answer, in the form of a triptych of novella-length character studies of more-or-less awful men. All are old enough to be constantly dogged by rumors of their own mortality, and…

Queen by Birgitta Trotzig is a novel that churns with the logic of its landscape—beautiful, bleak, alien, cold, callous, and cruel. Here, the poverty of the rural landscape becomes a vehicle for the cycles of trauma in the text: how we become hurt, how we hurt others, and then how we cope. But just as…

Mount Verity, the topographical namesake of Therese Bohman’s recent novel, is hallowed ground. A visitor who stands long enough on its plateau, or in the surrounding dark forest, might hear women whispering. Theirs are the muffled voices of those who died—or, as legend has it, disappeared into the mountain—during the seventeenth-century witch trials. If that…