“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…

“Some say depression rises from helplessness,” muses Jennifer Wortman’s narrator in the opening story of This. This. This. Is. Love. Love. Love. But “might it rise, instead, from a fear of power?” Rather than the fear we can do nothing, the narrator suggests, the terror of depression may be that we could do anything. Paralyzed…

Erosion is “the study of disappearing,” explains the narrator of the first story in Liz Breazeale’s collection Extinction Events. Brimming with maps of imaginary places and lost cities, and natural disasters in the form of volcanic eruptions and impact craters, Breazeale’s stories explore extinction in all its possible forms, from the disappearance of the dinosaurs…

“The line’s so thin between here and there — sickness and health, better or worse, the things we place insistently, arbitrarily, at opposite poles.” This is an observation of Mia’s, the sociologist at the center of Ashley Wurzbacher’s opening story “Sickness and Health” in her daring, often hilarious, and mostly satisfying debut collection, Happy Like…

As a literary place, Brussels has both real and metaphorical qualities that make it an enticing setting for fiction. It is a cosmopolitan metropolis, business hub, and the headquarters for such unusual institutions as the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. At the same time it is a synecdoche for the European Union,…

We can start with the facts. In 2005, a vast archive of records was discovered in a warehouse in downtown Guatemala City. The archive amounted to almost eighty million pages detailing the work of National Police during the Guatemalan Civil War — crimes against humanity including homicides, disappearances, and torture. Another fact: author Rodrigo Rey…

Gravity is an invisible force exerted between any two objects with mass. It holds the cosmos together, keeping the moon circling the Earth, and the Earth and planets circling our sun. As a relation between two bodies in space, gravity offers itself as a rich metaphor for a fiction writer. Appropriately enough, Melanie Joosten’s novel…

When a reader finishes the title story of R.L. Maizes’ first collection, We Love Anderson Cooper, it is likely they will know they are in the hands of a writer with compassion and empathy, someone worth reading. In the title story, the reader meets an adolescent boy named Markus who is preparing for his Bar…

A mantra thrums through the pages of A Girl Goes Into The Forest: No one can deter a person from her mistakes. Young women on the verge, on the cusp of becoming, with each generation tying their future to a man. Because they long for the world out there and mistakenly believe that he knows the…

Today, Luigi Pirandello is best known as a playwright. He won the 1934 Nobel Prize in Literature primarily “for his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art,” and with plays such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, he influenced such dramatists as Jean Anouilh, Jean-Paul Sartre, Eugène Ionesco, and Samuel Beckett.…

How dangerous is a butter knife? In Christina Milletti’s Choke Box: a Fem-Noir, the answer is very. In the novel’s early pages, a butter knife lodges itself in the thigh of Jane Tamlin’s ten-year-old son, setting off a series of events that lead to her family’s unraveling. Narrating from inside the walls of the Buffalo…