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…

Some disaster stories are aftermath stories. What happens after the [volcano erupts/bomb goes off/levees break/insert other crisis here]? What was the scale of the devastation? How does life go on post-catastrophe? In contrast, Faultland by Suzy Vitello deals only briefly in what happens after a deadly 6.9 magnitude earthquake ravages a post-pandemic Portland, Oregon in…

Most Filipinos know at least four languages — English and Tagalog, the two official national languages, plus legacy Spanish and a more localized language (or two or three). This multiplicity is aptly represented in Ulirát, an unprecedented collection of short stories that includes translations from seven of the more than one hundred languages of the…

One Saturday in October 1990, three women hit the road in a rusty blue Oldsmobile, heading out from Caudell, a small West Virginia town. One woman carries an oxygen tank. Another bears the bruises her husband has left on her face and arms. The last, the driver and our narrator, hauls the dead weight of…

The sheer number of people killed by COVID-19 makes it meaningless to say any other viral epidemic was “worse,” but the suffering and torture inflicted on Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak from March 2014 to June 2016 go beyond what anyone wants to imagine. For the Ivorian novelist Véronique Tadjo, it’s…

The title of Tommy Wieringa’s novel, The Death of Murat Idrissi, reveals its tragic ending: Murat, the Moroccan protagonist, will die. You know this. Yet you wait in heightened anticipation for what will happen next. The novel reads like a short story but packs such a punch that the reader is left gasping, overwhelmed by…

During my undergrad creative writing degree, students tended to pigeonhole, to narrow themselves down creatively. A student would read a piece of genre-fluid work only to hear, in that vulnerable afterglow, a response like, “Well, this is poetry, and as a prose writer, I can’t really comment.” I’m sure I did it, too, fearing to…

To be conquered is to be defeated, beaten, vanquished, crushed. The eight stories in Veronica Montes’ chapbook The Conquered Sits at the Bus Stop, Waiting are peopled by characters overwhelmed in some manner — by grief, by the desire to be seen, by the ceaseless march of time, by aging. But although Montes’ characters may…

Edendale, the first novel from Jacquelyn Stolos, takes place in Los Angeles during wildfire season and follows four roommates as small transgressions escalate into unforgivable ones. It is a tale of environmental horror in every sense of the phrase, charting ecological collapse alongside the collapse of a social microclimate: as the friends’ dynamic warps under…

The Invention of Love, Sara Schaff’s second short story collection, is a meditation on the messiness of love, art, and belonging in women’s lives. Schaff is fascinated by the journey of female identity — its origin, development, and influences. Eager to find out where they fit and how they’ll flourish, the women in Schaff’s collection…

The stories and novella of JD Scott’s Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day might be called fabulist, literary, millennial, parable-ish, or bildungsroman, but, as soon as the collection seems pin-able, another enchanting element surfaces. Scott’s range and rhythms delight. In one story, an insomniac narrator ruminates on the nature of reality via Wile…