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…

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…