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…

Set in the mountains and foothills east of Los Angeles, “Falling,” the lead story of its namesake collection, interweaves threads of human failing and falling with those of an earnestly described natural world threatened, perhaps inescapably, by wildfire and encroaching civilization. Juan’s climb and ultimate fall, though recounted in bits and pieces, some of them…

Like a master painter, Josip Novakovich sets his skillful new collection, Honey in the Carcase, against a shifting background of conflict — home and the family, war and displacement, love and betrayal. The stories are at times morose and bitter, and at other times, playful and joyful, experimenting with voice and perspective as much as…

When an author’s novel gets picked up by a reputable publisher, we can assume the manuscript has literary merit and that the story’s premise will hook a wide audience of readers. But as the book is fiction, and as bringing a story from raw manuscript to readers’ shelves takes months on end, we can never…

Molly Gaudry’s Desire: A Haunting connects the fairy tale realm to the real world and blends the two entities, so that reality becomes fantastical and the magical world becomes believable. Told through the first person point of view, the unnamed narrator tells us of the history of her life with such characters as Ogie, Zepha,…

“My journey to parallel realities, a secret laboratory hidden beneath the red mountain of New Mexico, and even the end of the world itself began with a lonely glass of bourbon in the saddest bar in Indianapolis.” The opening of Salvatore Pane’s sophomore novel, The Theory of Almost Everything gives a sample of what you…