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…

One of the most striking qualities of Aatif Rashid’s debut novel, Portrait of Sebastian Khan, is its ability to lay bare misunderstanding, in the moment it appears. This is not just about confusion, although many characters experience bewilderment throughout the narrative, but about willful misunderstanding or misinterpretation. Rashid tips the reader off clearly about the…

Our universe consists of people and events that are connected in ways not immediately apparent to the casual observer. Good fiction writing can depict how seemingly unrelated characters affect one another. The author can help the reader derive meaning from what appear to be random events and unexpected relationships, and to experience deep understanding and…

Tracks in the snow may deposit no permanent evidence in the fossil record, but it’s another matter in fiction and poetry, where every impression remains. In her poem “Birds in Snow,” H.D. tracks the pronged marks of bird talons through the frost, concluding that “the tracery written here / proclaims what’s left unsaid.” Wendy J.…

Confinement in plain sight is a process of breaking a thing apart and watching it die. The panopticon of sexism and male gaze riots in Aimee Parkison and Carol Guess’s book, Girl Zoo. But it is beyond mere seeing, it’s the speculative bending reality, it’s the text becoming its own confinement. The book is split…

A “wolf tone,” we’re informed on the first page of Christy Stillwell’s debut novel of the same name, “is a wobbling or stuttering pitch caused by the vibration of the bowed instrument’s string in competition with the vibration of its body.” Musicians and music lovers overwhelmingly reject the sound as “annoying,” “hideous,” or monstrous,” a…

In this richly textured debut, Fayeza Hasanat details the suffering and marginalization in Bangladeshi society, both in Bangladesh and in the US. The Bird Catcher and Other Stories contains multi-layered stories dealing with sexism, racism, xenophobia, and the struggles of forging a new identity from a multitude of cultural influences. These are not popcorn pieces:…

A speculative future formed the backdrop of The Age of Miracles, Karen Thompson Walker’s widely acclaimed first novel in 2012. The main character in that work is a twelve year old girl whose coming of age story is told in the context of a global disaster that puzzles the scientific community. In her newest novel…