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…

For the past decade, Ladette Randolph has illuminated aspects of the human condition in Nebraskan spaces — stoicism in the face of loss, the embrace of hard physical labor, faith as a source of both comfort and subjugation. The women in her narratives suppress their individuality, believing that they exist to support the agendas of…

In “Liddy, First to Fly,” the second story in Kim Fu’s new collection, four best friends perch at the edge of puberty. When Liddy develops bulbous and watery zit-like bumps on her ankles, the girls are horrified yet fascinated; when she sprouts oily black wings, the girls keep secrets from their mothers. The wings don’t…

In My Days of Dark Green Euphoria, A.E. Copenhaver reworks the age-old clash of generations, placing that story in a contemporary setting just as Western civilisation appears ready to disappear up its own fundament in a puff of carbon-neutral, gender-neutral, offense-neutral smoke. Slyly and deftly, the author skewers millennials as the risk-averse generation that invented…

In the title story from Hollows, Tommy Dean’s new collection of flash fiction, two teenage boys lie in a street. One asks the other what they’re doing there. ‘We’re dying. Can’t you feel it?’ your voice oozing with smoke rather than tears. No, I want to say, but there’s a code here, a puzzle that…

“Alexander’s the one who taught me all the rules,” says Karl Gustav, the narrator of Mads Nygaard’s coming-of-age novel When Me and God Were Little. Alexander is little Karl Gustav’s much older brother, and he has drowned in the North Sea. Their father, a boisterous boozer with a penchant for creative accounting, soon ends up…

A writer choosing their subject shows the world what they care about, what they obsess about, what keeps them up at night and away from the rest of their lives. Given the intense vulnerability of that decision, writers often keep their reasons under wraps. In Karolina Romqvist’s Bear Woman, this is not the case: this…