Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut novel, Without You Here, confronts the complexities of suicide with compassionate attention. In suicide’s aftermath, angels and ghosts converge. Those left behind must reconcile love with loss as they grieve what cannot be fully understood. Everything is haunted.  Precocious and sensitive, Noreen grows up in the shadow of her beloved aunt…

Pilar Adón’s Of Beasts and Fowls opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: “We are the birds that stay.” In this highly structured stream-of-consciousness novel exploring themes of salvation, isolation, and death, the reader is sometimes brought deep into the mind of the protagonist—and sometimes not. It doesn’t take long to realize that the protagonist,…

A lot of writers can’t fake it when it comes to kids. This isn’t their fault necessarily: many simply don’t know children and struggle to imagine them. Rarely does a writer get it right. Putting a firm cap on childlike whimsy, authors force fictional kids to focus on the boring world of adults or arrive…

When Tabitha, a fifty-year old writer in urgent need of cash, learns that Brent Vintner, a recognizably famous actor, and Piper Fields, a beloved children’s book author recently outed as the writer of erotic adult novels, are both staying in her small town for the summer, she hatches an ill-conceived scheme to complete both of…

The Inhabitants, a novel that takes place in a Gothic house, is a strange, eerie read. The action feels as if it were happening in another room, behind a velvet curtain.  The story follows artist and single mother Nilda Ricci, who inherits from her own mother a Victorian mansion rumoured to have been built by…

For most Americans, Fallujah conjures up images of dead Americans, their bodies burned in the street—images upon which the liberatory dreams of even the most starry-eyed were shattered. The name of the city is synonymous with—indeed, it is a metonym for—violent ruin. But Fallujah is more than a figure of speech. It is a city—one…

This daring and provocative story collection chronicles the lives of thirteen young Mexican women confronting remarkable hardships. The bold, unrepentant voices of Reservoir Bitches bait readers with moral dilemmas that undermine stereotypes—for instance, that women are inherently good and incapable of violence even when it’s necessary for them to survive and thrive.  Among the collection’s…

Cho Yeeun’s The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre, translated from Korean by Yewon Jung, begins with the story of two lost children, Yuji and Jua. They meet at the Lost Children Center at New Seoul Park, an amusement park outside Seoul, after each has been separated from her parents. Yuji comforts Jua, who cries uncontrollably,…

The Producer, an important character in the first story in Meg Pokrass’ First Law of Holes: New & Selected Stories, isn’t really a producer at all. He’s a ninety-year-old man with “a hole in his heart,” who had wanted to produce a film but never did, and who is cheating on his wife with the…

Reading a book is like living a life. You start at the beginning, you move through experiences, and you eventually arrive at the end. Even as you read about, or meander through, the present moment, you are also always aware of your steady motion toward something else. In fact, your anticipation of what comes next—of…

Any good book teaches the reader how to read it. “The Sea,” the first story in Kirstin Allio’s Double-Check for Sleeping Children, does so by inviting the reader to participate in its meaning-making. The story’s wave-lapping lines reveal depths that shimmer with suspense and anxiety and are disorienting in the most dangerously delicious way. Enter…

With its catastrophe flicks, zombie outbreaks, raging kaiju, and sharks of unusual size, Hollywood sells an apocalypse bristling with frenetic promise: stories told at breakneck pace, punctuated with do-or-die moments, noble sacrifices, and glimmers of resilience. But disaster is always domestic, mundane—a study in the simple yet strange art of making it from one day…