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…

A flash fiction is like a snow globe. A writer creates a miniature world and gives it a good shake, setting glittering bits into motion. These flakes of action whirl and settle, inspiring a jolt of wonderment in the reader, who eagerly awaits the next surprising inversion. For most of us, the world shrank drastically…

One description of Ashleigh Bell Pedersen’s debut novel, The Crocodile Bride, might begin: Sunshine Turner lives in the town of Fingertip. Without knowing more than this, a reader can’t help but consider the metaphoric possibilities. Sunshine: a joy, a light to cure the darkness, a vital ingredient to life. Turner: someone who changes course or…

Warnings of human traffickers abound on Facebook. One post might say that a man was sitting alone in his car by a particular mall, and was perhaps scouting for victims. Be careful in this park, another will read. Someone was handing out flyers, probably an excuse to get within grabbing distance. Innocuous actions become signs…

Set on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, Emma Seckel’s debut The Wild Hunt unfolds within a magical frame that’s hitched to the island’s specific geography. In this stirring and atmospheric historical novel, the setting plays a dominant role. The island’s coastline of harsh cliffs appears out of the fog like the answer…

Rendered into Western literature, monotony is usually the afflicting boredom of the unafflicted: the daily punch-in-punch-out; mewling kids needing to be fed and un-mussed; long lines in the post office, dust dancing through late afternoon sunbeams. It’s assumed as a matter of convention that chaos is roiling underneath. But what if chaos is on the…

“The banal of today will be in journals some day,” the Brazilian musician Chico Buarque once wrote. I don’t know if Buarque was thinking of his contemporary, Caio Fernando Abreu, when he wrote that lyric. But Moldy Strawberries, Abreu’s newly translated story collection, takes daily constraints and desires, neuroses and visions, and turns them into…

How did I become a writer who could no longer write? This is the question Rebecca van Laer sets out to answer in her debut novella How to Adjust to the Dark, which weaves fiction, poetry and literary criticism to trace the journey of a self-proclaimed ex-poet as she examines her past writing and, through…

Reading Dung Kai-cheung’s A Catalog of Such Stuff as Dreams Are Made On is like descending into a beautiful fever dream of Hong Kong in the late ‘90s. The story collection is both a time capsule, capturing Hong Kong through pop culture references like Hello Kitty and Air Jordans, and an incantation, breathing life into…

“And the days were made of auguries.” So begins Snow Crow, the sixth anthology of the best flash — short stories of three hundred words or less — from last year’s Bath Flash Fiction Award. Selected from a pool of nearly four thousand entries from sixty-four countries, Snow Crow collects a hundred and thirty-six stories…

Among fiction’s more compelling aspects is the sheer number of techniques that can be used to portray a world. In her new novel, The Visitors, Jessi Jezewska Stevens uses present-tense narration and free-indirect discourse to imagine a dystopian 2008 that looks an awful lot like that turbulent year as it transpired in this universe. Here…