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…

“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…