Little Bird is a book of tiny, fabulous adventures. Its narrators — mostly women who seem estranged from themselves — tell stories as if from the middle of a tightrope strung between small buildings. Anything can happen: One woman goes to a job interview with a wounded bird in her coat pocket; another meets a…

“I didn’t know how to take care of someone,” declares Willa Chen at the beginning of Win Me Something. Kyle Lucia Wu’s debut novel asks: What are the costs of caring? What are the politics — racial, gendered, class-related — of caring for and being a part of a family? What does belonging mean to…

No Diving Allowed is a collection of lively, wily stories that creep up from behind to pack unexpected punches. In this glorious scrap-box of richly-patterned fragments, each story is an all-too-brief immersion in a fully-formed world. The linking theme is swimming pools, yet Louise Marburg’s writing is so deft that it takes a while for…

A man, a self-described idler, is crashing in an empty office for a few weeks, happily reading the same book over and over, when a call from a wrong number sparks a strange romance. He and the woman talk off and on for weeks. He never learns her name. Just when he overcomes his impish…

In Where You Come From, Saša Stanišić rifles through the prose writer’s toolbox, deploying autofiction, fable, metanarrative, lists, and choose-your-own-adventure to compose a complex story of memory, identity, politics, and exile from a nation that no longer exists. The novel follows a protagonist named Saša Stanišić as he flees Yugoslavia with his family and they…

Blue Postcards, a novella by Douglas Bruton, is at once song, poem, and scripture, and it is woven as tightly and expertly as the twisted tekhelet threads in a Jewish prayer shawl’s four tassels. Tekhelet, it is important to know, is an ancient blue-violet dye whose precise means of manufacture have been lost to time. The word is translated…

The title of Straight from the Horse’s Mouth, by Moroccan writer Meryem Alaoui, translated by Emma Ramadan, immediately hints at the novel’s central preoccupation: the ambiguous value of firsthand testimony from a witness not granted the privileges of a full humanity. What sort of creature is speaking, and what makes her account compelling? The novel’s…

The futuristic world described in Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes — published in 1995 in Taiwan and recently translated into English by Ari Larissa Heinrich — is an undersea civilization in the year 2100, when relentless ultraviolet rays force humankind to shelter on the ocean floor. Meanwhile, militarized cyborgs called “M units” roam the surface, where…

Introducing Best Microfiction 2021, a collection of stories under 300 words, guest editor Amber Sparks describes “a hurricane blowing through these pieces, a sort of urgency you only find in writers in the midst of pleasure in pushing the envelope.” The contributors to this annual anthology, now in its third year, wholeheartedly embrace their roles…

For the characters in Lucy Jane Bledsoe’s Lava Falls, loneliness is a striking shared condition. These characters are already in situations of emotional isolation, and their remote settings — Antarctica, Alaska, Yellowstone — don’t give them any relief. This constriction only adds to what’s already inherent: fears of abandonment alternating with needs for love, for…

In King of the Animals, Josh Russell’s characters trade clothes, homes, kisses, insults, sad stories, and identities as they struggle to make sense of a nation changing faster than they can adapt. The stories in this collection move effortlessly through decades and take multiple forms, from perfect one-paragraph micros and sharply-etched flash fictions to longer…

The idea of purity — or, rather, the quest for it — is at the subtle heart of Disintegration In Four Parts, a set of novellas by Jean Marc Ah-Sen, Emily Anglin, Devon Code, and Lee Henderson. This strange, charming, and wistful collection springs from a one-sentence starting point: “All purity is created by resemblance…