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…

Sister Deborah by French-Rwandan writer Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti, begins in 1930s Rwanda with the arrival from the United States of a group of Black evangelical Christians preaching of a Black Jesus who will arrive on a cloud. The Americans bring with them Sister Deborah, a young woman noted for…

What an apt title for this memorable debut collection! Stuber’s grownups are often sad, both in terms of their affect and in performance of grownup tasks—notably, parenting. Happily, though, a wry humor and compassion give these well-crafted, moving stories balance and warmth. Stuber has created characters who are our contemporaries—strangers in a strange time—making it…

Writing for N+1, the novelist Raven Leilani has recently observed that while grief resists containment, fiction generally demands it. In her view, a story is a series of exclusions, and storytelling mainly involves decisions about what and does not belong in the story’s container. Softie, a debut collection by Megan Howell, confronts readers with stories…

At once a dystopian bildungsroman, a science fiction epic spanning millennia, and a philosophical thought experiment grappling with the ethics of AI, gene editing, and other burgeoning technologies, Deni Ellis Béchard’s We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine considers the meaning of human existence in a future when problems such as mortality, pain, scarcity, and…

With Thunderhead, her third novel, Miranda Darling rewrites Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) for contemporary readers, exchanging the genteel drawing rooms of post-WWI London for contemporary suburbia’s gleaming middle-class kitchens stocked with pricey appliances and organic produce. At the story’s heart is Winona Dalloway, a charmingly anxiety-ridden thirty-something who writes romance novels in harried spurts…