Alyson Mosquera Dutemple’s Marvelous Freaks of Nature! toggles seamlessly between the voices of children and adults who are behaving questionably, with the effect of reminding us how bizarre human experience can be.  Divided into three parts, each devoted to a different titular element—marvelous, freaks, and nature—the collection has a distinct Otessa Moshfegh energy. For instance,…

A student of mine—not a Trumper—told me recently that the 1950s was the last great period of stability for American citizens. I was startled by her declaration—after all, it was the decade of  McCarthyism, the Rosenbergs, Brown v. Board, Emmitt Till’s murder, and the Montgomery bus boycott, among other destabilizing events. The decade was good,…

The stories in Tom Andes’s new collection are often about endings: endings of relationships, of lives, of dreams and delusions. While the stories offer humor in abundance, they unfold in an atmosphere of ominous inevitability. They also reflect a concern with American factionalism—generational, political, cultural, regional—and the misunderstandings it engenders.  In “Nashville Radio,” the narrator,…

I wanted to review Book of Hours by Ellen O’Connell Whittet not because I am a mother—I am not—but because I am a medievalist. I was curious to see how the author incorporated the lives of medieval female saints into a story of a modern woman. In this novel, Whittet weaves faith, medicine, feminism, and…

The name Éric Rohmer conjures up, for fans of French New Wave cinema, images of lush lawns and beautiful young people, the sounds of their halfhearted flirtations and of waves crashing against sand. His legacy as a filmmaker is built on a sixty-year career that mixed these hallmark elements with a candid visual style and…

What drives a narrative, the author or the story’s inspiration? That’s one question absurdist-realist Indonesian writer Budi Darma explores in Olenka, a novel of literary obsession translated into English for the first time by Tiffany Tsao. While raising a classic question about the nature of fiction writing, Olenka suggests that the work of the fiction…

The Crossing of the Boars is the seventh novel from Zhang Guixing who, as a Mahua writer, is an ethnic Malaysian writing in Chinese. Zhang’s rich novel takes place in a fictional village called Krokop on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo, centered on the period of the Japanese invasion of the island during World…

Near the opening of Grace Krilanovich’s much-anticipated second novel, Acid Green Velvet, two youngsters give a bad man a good thrashing. “I’d only intended to smack him with a fence post, scare him a little,” explains Paulette—but plans go awry. The man is Paulette’s father, and he deserves it. He’s been using his daughter as…

Translated by Marita Thomsen, On the Other Side is March by Sólrún Michelsen is a meditation on the many losses of age and how these losses are balanced—sometimes—by insight and wisdom. This slim novel, which got under my skin and into my dreams, is also the first book by a Faroese woman to appear in…

Carolina Pihelgas’ The Cut Line is two things at once: a classic story about a bad breakup, and thoughtful geopolitical fable. Gorgeously translated from the Estonian by Daisy Hurford, the novel follows Liine, a middle-aged woman who flees her life in the city of Tartu, in southern Estonia, in an attempt to escape an abusive…

How We See the Gray, Rachel León’s debut novel, immerses the reader in the child welfare system. At one point, the team of social workers looks at mugshots online and plays a game to guess what each person did to end up in jail. The team genuinely cares about their work; they are just blowing…

Having neither a beginning nor an end, a perfect circle is continuous—a loop made of points equidistant from a fixed center. How fitting, then, that Claudia Petrucci’s The Perfect Circle, translated from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel, resists a singular beginning. Instead of starting from a single point in time, the novel cycles between…