Reading a book is like living a life. You start at the beginning, you move through experiences, and you eventually arrive at the end. Even as you read about, or meander through, the present moment, you are also always aware of your steady motion toward something else. In fact, your anticipation of what comes next—of…

Any good book teaches the reader how to read it. “The Sea,” the first story in Kirstin Allio’s Double-Check for Sleeping Children, does so by inviting the reader to participate in its meaning-making. The story’s wave-lapping lines reveal depths that shimmer with suspense and anxiety and are disorienting in the most dangerously delicious way. Enter…

With its catastrophe flicks, zombie outbreaks, raging kaiju, and sharks of unusual size, Hollywood sells an apocalypse bristling with frenetic promise: stories told at breakneck pace, punctuated with do-or-die moments, noble sacrifices, and glimmers of resilience. But disaster is always domestic, mundane—a study in the simple yet strange art of making it from one day…

In Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, the unnamed narrator, a woman who is patient at a psychiatric institution, examines the rituals of collective life against and with that institution. The novel’s three sections consist of vignettes that document the narrator’s day-to-day as well as her interiority, focusing on her…

When I sat down to read Diego Gerard Morrison’s Pages of Mourning, I was at a bar where two men were swapping stories. Twice, I heard “my beloved Mexico City” at the exact same moment that I read the words “Mexico City,” as if each of these men were briefly narrating the novel’s central geography.…

What’s it like to be young? Mostly it’s boring. The young student stares at her phone, eats poorly, stays up late, sleeps badly. There’s schoolwork, idols performing on livestreams, Starbucks drinks. Young love, with its exciting and uncertain intrusions into daily life, can play a starring role. But love is repetitive too. By incessantly texting…

To make a novel about a circus solemn and subdued is a singular feat, and one Franco-Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin accomplishes effortlessly in Vladivostok Circus. More interested in painting dreamlike landscapes and tapping into characters’ innermost isolation than in delivering a spectacular show, Vladivostok Circus drops readers in the starkness of the Russian Far…

Part coming-of-age story, part romance, part family drama, the novel Still Alive by LJ Pemberton spans its untethered narrator’s life across cities, times, and tenses.  A young creative, V—short for Virginia, a fittingly American name given her cross-country travels—moves from her childhood home in Oregon to New York and then Los Angeles. Yet she returns…

Our editors share their recommendations for books to enjoy over the summer break.

Set mainly on an island in the Paraná Delta, Selva Almada’s Not a River, the final entry in a loosely connected trilogy, tells the story of a fishing trip gone wrong. On the trip are three men coping badly with a shared tragedy. Their trip repeats one from twenty years earlier, except old friends El…

Set in the richly diverse Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, the seventeen stories in Annell López’s smart and compelling debut collection engage with identity, racism, family, self-worth, and intimacy. Her characters range from Dominican immigrants like herself to white gentrifiers, and from tweens to the nearly middle-aged. Virtually all are on trajectories that ride…

The Good Deed reads like history that has been written over and over; perhaps it is just that the stories are as old as time, and displaced women and children—mute and damaged survivors—have been given voices. Benedict’s harrowing narrative highlights the ways in which hope and home are brutally wrenched from these refugees; the only…