From Rosamond Lehmann to Tama Janowitz, women writers have sought to distil the modern feminine experience in tales that curl and pulse. Louise Marburg, who wrote You Have Reached Your Destination during the revelatory extremity of the Covid-19 lockdown, achieves a similar intensity as she peels away layers of so-called normality and respectability to reveal the mess…

The Ukrainian journalist Stanislav Aseyev lost touch with his writing while captured by pro-Russian militants in 2017. In “The Bell,” an excerpt from his memoir, Aseyev reclaims his art. “Writing, like boxing, required constant training,” he writes, and he finds himself “completely out of shape after being held captive.” This excerpt appears in Love in…

Jill Stukenberg’s debut News of the Air follows a family living in the Northwoods of Wisconsin in an eerily plausible climate disaster-affected future. The atmosphere is foreboding, and the area is increasingly deserted. Will Allie, Bud, and Cassie stay? It’s the suspense in this question—more accurately, this conflict—that drives the novel.   Allie Krane was pregnant…

Panics by Barbara Molinard reads like a classic in the making. First published in French as Viens in 1969, this new translation by Emma Ramadan conveys the essence of Molinard’s preoccupations. Each story contains a singular vision and a confident, haunting voice, and unfolds with the dull terror of a nightmare. The author’s biography is filled with captivating…

In “An Aura Surrounds That Night,” the novella that closes Tara Lynn Masih’s haunting new collection How We Disappear, Yellow Rose, a psychic, becomes a mentor to a grief-stricken girl named Mercy whom she suspects of having mystical gifts of her own. “You’ll never be able to look at this world the same way again, after this…

When I first visited the Basque Country, a region in northern Spain, I felt very close to the sea, as close as you can get while still keeping both feet on dry land. Kirmen Uribe’s Bilbao-New York-Bilbao gives readers a taste of this sea, as well as an intimacy with the lives connected to it.…

Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-Jim, translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, is, at its core, a story about learning how to accept what one cannot change. This theme finds expression in the narrator’s relationship with her daughter. Readers could interpret the narrator, who remains nameless throughout, as eternally pessimistic. She says, early on,…

How many ways can a human being disappear? Existentially: in the uncaring maw of an anonymizing city. Sensually: being completely disconnected from other humans. Noirishly: disappearing from sight. Physically: taken away, made not-human, by some vast and uncaring system. All these possibilities are explored in Perhat Tursun’s novel from Xinjiang, The Backstreets. Tursun started writing The Backstreets in…

Each of the nineteen sharply faceted stories comprising In the Between: 21st Century Short Stories, edited by Brice Particelli, differently takes up the theme of being misunderstood. In this state — disregarded, disrespected, dissed — you’re not the person you’ve been mistaken for, but you’re not quite yourself either. You’re in the between. Anchoring the collection are powerful stories…

Between 1989 and 1998, Icelandic-Canadian writer Kristjana Gunnars penned five short novels that traveled fluently through genres — philosophy, literary theory, criticism, memoir, fiction, poetry, even nature writing — and anticipated autofiction before the genre was defined. Published originally and exclusively in Canada, Gunnars’ quintet has been published a single volume: The Scent of Light.…

It’s the early twentieth century, and a young woman named Temerity West is working as an agent for the British imperial government. A young man, Kostya Nikto, is an NKVD officer under Stalin. In Constant Nobody, the award-winning novel from Canadian writer Michelle Butler Hallett, these two characters’ lives intertwine in unexpected ways that are…

Safe Places, Kerry Dolan’s debut story collection, explores the oddities of human bonds and longings. Set in various places from the city to the remote countryside, these stories evoke entire worlds. Though their settings vary, human responses — sometimes gentle, other times monstrous — form the heart of this collection. A fundamental aspect of human…