How much power do you have over your life? That’s the question Dominique Barbéris raises in her short novel A Sunday in Ville-d’Avray. One Sunday afternoon, two married sisters connect in a garden in Ville-d’Avray. Under the affluent veil of the idyllic suburb in western Paris, in neatly cut grass gardens, lie little molehills filled…

In Lana Bastašić’s tale of two school friends who meet after several decades to drive across Bosnia, a phone call from an old school friend jolts Sara, a Bosnian now living in Dublin, backwards in time to the Balkan wars. Lejla, who has changed almost everything about herself including her eye colour, imbues every scene…

Separated by seven decades yet unified by their living space, the real-life psychiatrist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and the fictional psychotherapist Eliza Kline communicate across time in Frieda’s Song, a historical novel by Ellen Prentiss Campbell about the work of healing. At the outset, it is 1935. Fromm-Reichmann boards a ship to escape Nazi Germany, leaving behind her…

One could be tempted to describe Spirits of the Ordinary by Kathleen Alcalá as a family saga, set against the backdrop of social unrest at the US-Mexican border in the 1870s, but it feels more accurate to depict it as the deeply existential account of a set of remarkable characters torn between the mandates of…

In Cuba in 1993, daily life was a series of mathematical calculations. There were the calculations of rations, of loved ones who had emigrated and the percentage of friends who remained (for now) and, above all, of the odds that things would ever improve. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which ended the subsidies…

If there are definitive themes to be found in Ethel Rohan’s new collection of stories, one is Ireland, and the other is men — how they arrive from over the hill, under the bridge, at the side of the road, and bring with them their world. They rise from the Irish countryside and the American…

The greatest pleasures of Rikki Ducornet’s Trafik are linguistic, or, more accurately, they are sonic, tactile — in a word, sensual. Consider this early passage, which not only captures the book’s tone, rhythm, and playful humor but also introduces one of its character’s obsession with the sensual qualities of objects: For Mic, the Lights are…

Tropicália, a ripe morsel of a short story collection by Ananda Lima, offers three tightly-wound speculative satires that are hard to swallow but exciting to read. If you were to pitch the stories in the collection — for instance, the opening “Antropófaga,” in which a grieving Brazilian immigrant woman ingests bite-size, foil-wrapped Americans straight from…

Many in our culture are fascinated by polygamy, a popular topic of reality TV, dramas, and news media coverage. It is hard to look away when these stories focus on the most shocking details; almost everyone has seen images of women and young girls in long, buttoned-up dresses and old-fashioned, almost otherworldly hairstyles, their uniformity…

Close to the end of Frances Macken’s debut novel You Have to Make Your Own Fun Around Here, Katie, the narrator, visits Evelyn, her lifelong friend. The characters are now in their early twenties and still living in their hometown Glenbruff, a fictionalized rural community in the west of Ireland. Evelyn is distraught, and she…

The drama of Bluebeard, the original fatal husband, turns mainly upon a locked door. After bringing his bride to his castle of dangerously explorable rooms, he points out the locked one and hands her the key — which she is under no circumstances permitted to use. Consumed by her need to know, which his prohibition…

Minae Mizimura’s second novel, An I-Novel, is experimental: it is the first bilingual novel printed horizontally in Japanese. It follows a day in the life of Minae, a 30-some-year-old Ph.D. in French literature at an Ivy League school, who is holed up in an apartment rife with reminders of her ex-boyfriend. Her apartment is practically…