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…

The Living Dolls and Other Women is a book with a mission: to remind us all (especially women) of How Things Used to Be. In this world, female artists can’t get shown in galleries, pornography is everywhere, and men routinely harass women on the street. Harried working mothers expect themselves to be superwomen and, unable…

In Love Stories for Hectic People, Catherine McNamara collects thirty-three stories spanning a breathless ninety-nine pages. Never predictable or saccharine, the stories are funny, shocking, carnal, familial, transgressive, transcendent — and full of movement. McNamara’s characters have either just arrived or they’re about to leave. Couples move houses; lovers meet in hotel rooms continents away…

In the middle of “Collateral Beauty,” the fifth of the six stories included in María Ospina’s Variations on the Body, a woman named Estefanía receives a book from a man with whom she’s been corresponding, whom she wishes to meet but is unable to find. But the book isn’t actually a book. Maybe it once…

Resi, the narrator of Higher Ground, is a writer, a wife, and a mother; middle-aged and raging against her own departed mother, she dreams of family while straining against the ideal of the nuclear. “Listen, Bea,” she begins, “the most important thing and the most awful, and the hardest to understand […] is this: nothing…

  In her debut collection of fiction, Caitlin Vance doesn’t deconstruct the barriers between genres so much as insist that those barriers never existed: The Paper Garden shifts easily between folktale, horror, biblical satire, and realism. Many of the narrators are children, or adults revisiting childhood memories, which lends the collection a moral earnestness that…

On a sweltering day in early spring, Oséias appears on his sister’s doorstep like a ghost. No one is expecting him, not since he left town twenty years before. No one has heard from him, either, communication with his family having petered out in the meantime. With no explanation for his return, Oséias begins haunting…