Novelist Jill McCroskey Coupe is fascinated by unconventional relationships. In her 2016 debut novel, True Stories at the Smoky View, she writes about an unlikely friendship between an older woman and a ten-year-old child, both of whom are struggling to come to terms with death and abandonment. Beginning with Cannonballs, McCroskey Coupe’s second novel, revisits…

The statistics are horrifying: worldwide, one in three women experience gender-based violence during their lifetimes; 58% of the 87,000 women murdered around the world in 2017 were killed by intimate partners or family members; in the United States alone, at least twenty-six transgender people were killed in 2019, of which 91% were black women. There…

The two beings looked exactly like the spirit creatures I had seen in folktale books — they had human bodies, red faces with long noses, and wings. You mean tengu? Sensei asked. Yes, these were tengu, I replied. Their faces were beautiful shades of red, just as depicted in books. So runs Hiromi Kawakami’s Parade,…

Jason Brown’s A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed is a linked story collection about families, storytelling, and how the two combine. It gives the history of the once-eminent Howland family, whose hold on their legacy and land on the Maine coast slips over the course of decades. The stories cycle through…

I read Hilary Leichter’s debut novel Temporary when I am twenty-one and looking for a job post-graduation. Indeed.com is my top searched website as well as my most-loathed enemy. When I type in keywords like “writing” and “social media” and “graphics” and “Chicago,” the ARC of Temporary winks at me. I glare back and ignore…

For many Americans, the fall of the Soviet Union in December of 1991 has faded into history. It is of the past, removed, something that makes for good television. At most, it is an event of international importance, something that happened “over there.” This is less true for Americans who were born in the USSR…

Christian TeBordo’s sixth book is a collection of short stories connected by yearning and loneliness. A pair of brothers build a flying machine and taunt their mother; a sister runs away, leaving her sister to question why; androids populate a town center only to question their own existence; and a death metal band gets mistaken…

The main character and sometime narrator of Labyrinth, the fourth novel by Turkish writer Burhan Sönmez, is a handsome, twenty-eight-year-old blues singer named Boratin, who jumped off the Bosphorus Bridge and survived his suicide attempt with a rib broken and all of his personal memories lost. The account of his effort to relocate himself within…

Perhaps there’s never been a better geographical setting and literary form pairing than the Midwest and the short story. Both are eccentric in their terrain, with forms unruly, and boundaries always under negotiation. The Midwest can be overwhelming in scope, and some novelists like Jonathan Franzen and Wallace Stegner have successfully contained its quiet splendor…

A lot in Israeli writer Zeruya Shalev’s fifth novel to be translated into English, Pain, is familiar territory. A married woman, finding herself bored with married life, seeks something better. That something better is another man, who promises to be the antidote to her boredom. Drama ensues. In this novel’s case, the woman is Iris,…

“It was my birthday when I found out that all the birds were electric,” the narrator proclaims in the first story of Sadie Hoagland’s collection, American Grief in Four Stages. This is indicative of the world Hoagland presents in these stories, one easily recognizable as our own, yet slightly bizarre — these strange details producing…

After working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for almost a quarter of a century, Christine Coulson took a year’s sabbatical to bring together the volume now published as Metropolitan Stories. A well-received article “Behind the Scenes at the Met,” published in April 2016 in the New York Times Style Magazine, had introduced many of…