What an apt title for this memorable debut collection! Stuber’s grownups are often sad, both in terms of their affect and in performance of grownup tasks—notably, parenting. Happily, though, a wry humor and compassion give these well-crafted, moving stories balance and warmth. Stuber has created characters who are our contemporaries—strangers in a strange time—making it…

Writing for N+1, the novelist Raven Leilani has recently observed that while grief resists containment, fiction generally demands it. In her view, a story is a series of exclusions, and storytelling mainly involves decisions about what and does not belong in the story’s container. Softie, a debut collection by Megan Howell, confronts readers with stories…

At once a dystopian bildungsroman, a science fiction epic spanning millennia, and a philosophical thought experiment grappling with the ethics of AI, gene editing, and other burgeoning technologies, Deni Ellis Béchard’s We Are Dreams in the Eternal Machine considers the meaning of human existence in a future when problems such as mortality, pain, scarcity, and…

With Thunderhead, her third novel, Miranda Darling rewrites Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway (1925) for contemporary readers, exchanging the genteel drawing rooms of post-WWI London for contemporary suburbia’s gleaming middle-class kitchens stocked with pricey appliances and organic produce. At the story’s heart is Winona Dalloway, a charmingly anxiety-ridden thirty-something who writes romance novels in harried spurts…

In Aruni Kashyap’s collection of thirteen short stories, The Way You Want to Be Loved, characters tied to Assam confront familial guilt, racism, homophobia, and the isolation endured by young people living far from home. As the stories cross oceans and time periods, Kashyap keeps readers engaged with his impeccably developed characters as they forge…

Our editors share a few of their most memorable books of the year

Change is often imagined as a moment of high drama—a birth or death, a calamity or a great good fortune, a stroke of luck, good or bad. But change rarely happens all at once. More often, change occurs as a series of events, of decisions and revisions, of slow bloomings or strangulations, until you wonder…

The stories in Good Night, Sleep Tight are unsettling, weird, and sometimes downright terrifying. Each story engages tropes of sci-fi and horror, weaving humanoid robots,  themes of mothering and familial relationships, and characters trapped in their own minds and bodies in ways that push past the boundaries of reality. Altogether the stories create a pervasive…

Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut novel, Without You Here, confronts the complexities of suicide with compassionate attention. In suicide’s aftermath, angels and ghosts converge. Those left behind must reconcile love with loss as they grieve what cannot be fully understood. Everything is haunted.  Precocious and sensitive, Noreen grows up in the shadow of her beloved aunt…

Pilar Adón’s Of Beasts and Fowls opens with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson: “We are the birds that stay.” In this highly structured stream-of-consciousness novel exploring themes of salvation, isolation, and death, the reader is sometimes brought deep into the mind of the protagonist—and sometimes not. It doesn’t take long to realize that the protagonist,…

A lot of writers can’t fake it when it comes to kids. This isn’t their fault necessarily: many simply don’t know children and struggle to imagine them. Rarely does a writer get it right. Putting a firm cap on childlike whimsy, authors force fictional kids to focus on the boring world of adults or arrive…

When Tabitha, a fifty-year old writer in urgent need of cash, learns that Brent Vintner, a recognizably famous actor, and Piper Fields, a beloved children’s book author recently outed as the writer of erotic adult novels, are both staying in her small town for the summer, she hatches an ill-conceived scheme to complete both of…