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…

Claire Fuller’s latest novel, Unsettled Ground, follows fifty-one-year-old twins Jeanie and Julius as they struggle to manage after their mother’s sudden death. This loss inspires questions about debts, marriage, murder, and more, prompting the twins begin to wonder why their family lived such an isolated life in their small, ramshackle cottage. As the twins begin…

Florida is a land of dueling identities. It’s home to white, sandy beaches and alligator-infested swamps alike. It’s a state that is simultaneously a dreamy tropical getaway and one hurricane away from total obliteration. And Then the Gray Heaven, a novella by RE Katz, leans all the way into Florida’s fractured sense of self, deploying…

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…