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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…
Anu Kandikuppa’s debut story collection, The Confines (Veliz Books, 2025) takes a grimly absurd look at marriage, reimagining love, attraction, and the social conventions that bind human beings. In stories set in India and the United States, eccentric characters struggle to express themselves—through binge eating, hypochondria, yelling at a corpse, and even through bird poop. They…
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,…
The experience of a young adult returning home after a long absence is not always a simple one. Warm feelings of nostalgia mingle with darker memories—the ones childhood so expertly preserves. Compounding the interior turmoil is the exhausting daily task of presenting a new self to those who persist in seeing only the former child…
Resist the temptation to employ metafictional techniques to mock your partner’s propensity for sending the story back to you after having added nothing more than a few paragraphs examining the origin of a single word or phrase.
These Worn Bodies (Moon City Press, Nov. 1, 2024) by Avitus B. Carle is collection of flash fiction that is wondrous in its form and its imagination. Bodies are deconstructed to discrete parts (boobs! orgasms!) or made of paper or popcorn. Flies are elevated to main characters. Agency is for everyone. Both societal and genre…
When an old Soviet satellite wipes out a Parisian hypermarket, the explosion kills a landlord and gives his tenant, Gerard Fulmard, a temporary reprieve from paying his rent. Despite living only a few hundred yards from the obliterated hypermarket, Fulmard––protagonist of Jean Echenoz’s Command Performance––prefers to find out what’s happening by switching on his television…