Little Foxes Took Up Matches is set in Russia, and I am reviewing this liberatingly slippery novel just as war has spilled out from that country. Katya Kazbek, whose heritage is Russian, Ukrainian, Greek, and Jewish, and who writes in both Russian and English, might be the perfect indefinable author for such strange binary times,…

Sara Lippmann’s Jerks is a book you can indeed judge by its cover. While the retro photo of two tennis players shaking hands is comical and fun, an undeniably rich story is packed into the image, which hints at hidden depths. Are these seemingly civil people as nice as they appear? The image neatly sums up Lippmann’s…

Jeanne, expert crafter of artificial flowers, is on a tram in Paris in 1918. A soldier with horrific facial injuries enters her carriage, causing the crowd to “turn and flinch away … half-pitying, half-appalled … The whole structure of his face has been destroyed.” The passengers, electrified, react with horrified sympathy; children are exhorted to…

In Quake, the English-language debut novel by award-winning Icelandic author Auður Jónsdóttir, a woman falls to the sidewalk in Reykjavik and wakes up in the hospital, having suffered a seizure that has all but erased her memory. It does return, but only slowly, in terrifying fragments. She has a young son. He was holding her…

Like all of us these days, Jared Joseph has scorched earth. I am here to write a book review and have just realized that there may be no actual book for it to be about. The Table of Contents for A Book About Myself Called Hell lists three sections: “Preface to a Book;” “Critical Commentary…

Imagine a death for which no one is left to grieve, and only the birds are left to tell the story. This is the death of a city which, under ecological and environmental pressures, can no longer sustain the human life that created it. If we could look into the mind of this city as…

I used to think fairy tales were only for kids — classics adapted by Disney, fantastical stuff used to lull children to sleep. But I’ve been reading fairy tales all wrong. They’re not just simple stories with a “happily ever after.” Operating in the safe space of “once upon a time,” they give us a…

There’s a joke that people who study Eastern Europe like to tell. An old man in a small town is talking to a foreign dignitary about his life: “I was born in Galicia, went to school in Poland, worked in the Soviet Union, and am retired in Ukraine.” The dignitary marvels at how well-traveled the…

In folklore, a Barghest is a huge dog with sharp teeth and claws; its appearance portends death. A different but no less frightening Barghest haunts Kayla Chenault’s These Bones. In this keen, smart, and unsettling debut novel, the residents of a besieged Black community known as the Bramble Patch seize moments of joy and redemption…

Deadheading, the practice of pruning dead flower heads in order to preserve the plant, provides Beth Gilstrap with a rich metaphor around which to organize her new story collection. The twenty-two stories in Deadheading & Other Stories, which won the 2019 Red Hen Press Women’s Prose Prize, range widely in content, tone, and voice. But…

Novels about affairs have become so commonplace that it takes a fresh perspective to set one apart. Agnès Riva’s debut novel, Geography of an Adultery, translated from French by John Cullen, does just that. By documenting an affair according to the places the couple meets, the novel offers a wholly original exploration of how real…

In Siege of Comedians, Susan Daitch’s fifth novel, a trio of unlikely sleuths slips down a series of dark chutes through time and space in search of vanished others. Wildly sensitive to the detritus of human existence, they all land in the same subterranean warren of evidence, sniffing out connections that they traced by means…