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,…

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…

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…

In Doctor Faustus, Mephistophilis offers the hero a hell of deal: twenty-four years of fortune, followed perhaps by some minor burning. The temptation, which plays on the common reflex of “take now, worry later,” is an inversion of narrative: for Faustus, who knows how the story will end, the real excitement is in getting there.…

The nine short pieces in this chapbook form a landscape fraught with dangerous pitfalls and survived thanks to female camaraderie. One of the collection’s strongest pieces,“The Island,” is set in antiquity, yet its themes are modern and encompassing. Christiana Elena wanders the countryside berry picking, only to return to her village where she finds the…

A slim novel in three parts, Living in Your Light centers on Malika, an indomitable Moroccan woman modeled on the author’s mother. Visiting the souk with her father at Béni-Mallal, south of Rabat, in the mid-1950s, seventeen-year-old Malika falls headlong in love with Allal, the son of a distant relative. Her father leaves the pair…

In Alex Higley’s True Failure, if the American Dream survives anywhere, it’s in the realm of reality TV, where shrewd producers create a social microcosm in which small windfalls come to those bold enough to compete for them. True Failure centers on the fictitious Big Shot, a Shark Tank-esque production where aspiring contestants pitch business…