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…

Leonard was raised by his mother alone with cheerfully concealed difficulty, his father having died tragically during childbirth. Though she was not by nature the soldiering type, she taught him to look at life as a daisy chain of small events, each of which could be made manageable in its own way. She was a…

Our Colony Beyond the City of Ruins, the debut collection from Janalyn Guo, presents twelve pieces of fabulist fiction bursting with splendid and unsettling transformations. United by Guo’s lyrical and meditative prose, these stories take readers from China to Paris to worlds not yet known, investigating what remains in the aftermaths of our most intimate…

In a happy postscript to Kat Meads’ novel, Miss Jane: The Lost Years, the female chorus celebrates a fact often lost in stories about sexual predation: victims manage to escape their abusers and “defeat every tiny tyrant.” Meads focuses her story of sexual misconduct by reconceiving the genre of the college novel through structural and…

Meg Pokrass’ newest collection of flash and micro fiction titled Alligators at Night illustrates why she is a master of short fiction. Endorsed by several reputable writers, as she always is, the one who captured it best was Stuart Dybek (Ecstatic Cahoots): The nuanced tonal complexity, which can go from the whimsical to a darker…

A boutique fitting room. A bus shelter bench. A conference room in a telecom firm. The tales in The Lonesome Bodybuilder place the reader in seemingly ordinary settings — so ordinary that when the strangeness encroaches in the form of alien customers and umbrellas that make businessmen fly, Yukiko Motoya’s narration blends the bizarre so…

Longlisted for the 2019 PENRobert W. Bingham Prize for Short Story Award, Jenn Scott’s Her Adult Life is a standout on the list and worthy of more attention. Scott’s riveting emotional book stands out for the strength of its writing and for its portraits of small town waitresses, factory workers and fast food restaurant managers…