Floating Notes by Babak Lakghomi is in equal parts sure-footed and disorienting. Beyond simply telling a story, the experimental thriller works to involve the reader in the experience of paranoia. In 100 pages, segmented in short bursts of language, Lakghomi creates an immersive text that grapples with absurdity and alienation. The narrative is remincient of…

Eventide: the title in English of this excellent third novel by Swedish author Therese Bohman is literary, poetic, old-fashioned. It carries an echo of the hymn tune of that name (associated with the hymn of longing Abide with me), perhaps paralleling the reference in the original to Pär Lagerkvist’s Aftonland (set to music by Arne…

Adela Frost is the millennial you love to hate. The eighteen-year-old recent high school graduate has one eye on the thing she’s doing and the other on how doing it will seem on Facebook. Life for Adela, in the early chapters of Rosalie Metro’s debut novel, Have Fun in Burma, is more a performance for…

Most books are like planets. However beautiful and intricate and admirable, they still feel finite and self-contained. Knowable when enjoyed with a reader’s careful interest. Some books, though, are more like galaxies. They contain a vast expanse of moving parts that, while often associated, are not directly connected. And like the planets and stars held…

The new book Monster Portraits, published in a beautiful, slim volume by Rose Metal Press, consists of a collection of written vignettes by Sofia Samatar, which are based on series of drawings, the monster portraits of the title, by her brother Del Samatar. Readers might expect the pieces included in such a book to be…

Never Anyone But You is the story of the lives of two French intellectuals, who lived together in Nantes, Paris and on the island of Jersey between 1917 and 1954: Lucie Schwob and Suzanne Malherbe. Both were artists, better known as Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore. The story is told through the eyes and voice…

An ocean or a desert fills the horizon. Its undulations break across some tiny inhabited quarter. People actually come here for their own enjoyment. They will get little of any such thing, in this so called resort, with its weed choked lots and poorly furnished rooms. They argue instead. They fuck on dingy beds. They…

I’ve been dipping in and out of Geert Mak’s mammoth In Europe (translated by Sam Garrett) for the past couple of months. Crisscrossing the continent, Mak follows many strands of the twentieth century: what led to conflicts and what resolved them; which cities were in ascendance and which in decline; what forces rippled across the…

All families have secrets, but some families have more secrets — and deadlier ones — than others. This might be an accurate summary of Víctor del Árbol’s novel A Million Drops, but describing it as such would run the risk of oversimplifying a story that is considerably more complex. I fear it is this very…

Susan Tepper’s seventh book, Monte Carlo Days & Nights, is a slim novel about two individuals on a weeklong holiday in Monte Carlo. It is not a love story, and there is very little romance involved. What is involved is a lot of lust, or sex, beautiful clothes along with beautiful food, expensive hotels and…

Nearly four years after the publication of her short story collection Every Kiss a War, Leesa Cross-Smith, founder and editor of WhiskeyPaper, has followed up with Whiskey & Ribbons, her poignant debut novel. The story focuses on three individuals — Evangeline, Eamon, and Dalton — tied together by marriage, brotherhood, love, and bereavement. Six months…

Toward the beginning of Hanne Ørstavik’s novella Love, protagonist Vibeke muses to herself while looking out of her living room window onto the small Norwegian village where she has recently moved. She thinks, “We need to address architecture, the way it brings things together.” Vibeke works for the town as an Arts and Culture officer,…