The stories in The Sea Gives Up the Dead, Molly Olguín’s debut collection, are remarkable for the ways in which they skate between the weird and the mundane, the ordinary and the out-of-the-question, never wholly letting on whether the wild events they portray are truly extraordinary or are, rather, everyday events that have been generously…

A sobering, disquieting reality is that identity isn’t entirely intrinsic: We are shaped by our circumstances. Within that disquiet, the idea persists that there is a core—something immutable—to every person. Nevertheless, people can be shaped, altered, mutated, changed. That identity can be imposed by others with more power and privilege, is frightening.  This possibility, explored…

At the center of Scar, originally published in Spanish as Cicatriz (2015), is Sonia, a young woman who is bored by her job and burdened by life at home with her overwhelmed mother, younger siblings, and grandmother with worsening dementia. As someone who has “always liked wearing masks,” Sonia finds escape online, frequenting chat rooms…

Halfway through John Chrostek’s Boxcutters is a brief, deadpan story in which Richard Nixon wades into a fishpond and becomes a conduit for “the Sight.” Believing himself to be clairvoyant, even though he actually sees the past, Nixon recalls his indifference to a young Black man’s tragic death while he was president. Before he can…

Sherrie Flick’s marvelous new collection opens in a Budapest train station where two travelers are approached by a bear whose hairy ass is covered by flowered undies. In his paws is his own beating heart, which he holds out as an offering. One of the travelers is horrified, but the narrator feels differently. In her…

Humans are animals. This is not necessarily a revelatory statement. Yet Julia Hannafin, in their debut novel Cascade, confronts this fact afresh in a poignant and dazzling exploration of the conditions in which we feel our animality.  Set amid a marine biology expedition on an island off the coast of San Francisco, Cascade literalizes the…

A biographer, a novelist, and a publisher are standing by a lake. That’s not the beginning of a joke—that’s the opening of Wrongful, Lee Upton’s new novel. With literary criticism, novels, poems, and short stories in her wake, Upton now offers a literary whodunit that revolves around the disappearance of a famous writer from a…

In the opening scene of The Passenger Seat, Vijay Khurana’s elegant debut novel, two teenagers teeter, nearly naked, on the rail of a steel truss bridge. Each boy peers surreptitiously at the other. Just as the thickening eroticism threatens to break the surface of their friendship, they plunge into the narrow river. On splashdown one…

Short stories can help us see the world in new ways or they can reflect the world in which we find ourselves living. The stories in Alternative Facts, the extraordinary collection by Emily Greenberg, do both. In doing so, they take risks which pay off—at least for readers who appreciate adventurous fiction.  The stories are…

An elaborate and breathtaking historical novel, Peter Geye’s A Lesser Light unfolds over eight months in and around the Gininwabiko Lighthouse, located on the shore of Lake Superior, in 1910. Here Willa eagerly waits to catch a glimpse of Halley’s Comet while her husband, Theodulf, fears its passing will rain down poison on the earth.…

Carmen Boullosa’s Texas: The Great Theft is a sprawling novel, immense in scope despite its limited setting on the Texas-Mexico border, in the towns of Brownsville (Brunveille) and Matamoros (Matasanchez). Boullosa sometimes gives the absurd impression that this is a parsimonious narrative. In fact the breadth of life on offer here is immense. The novel…

In Fang Fang’s letter to readers at the end of Soft Burial, she defines the meaning of her novel’s title as the act of being “put into the earth without a coffin,” such that “one’s body [is] placed directly into the dirt.” Such a departure, with its implication of suffering in the life to come,…