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,…

Male culture in America and elsewhere is at the center of a critical storm in 2018, at least when it’s not being hauled off in handcuffs or fired. This may not be the best year for the release of a bro-book. Still, for lovers of a good story, and those interested in a subtle revisioning…

The opening image of Miguel Bonnefoy’s Black Sugar — a pirate ship marooned in the canopy of a rainforest — invites the suspension of disbelief necessary to fully appreciating the rest of the book. Black Sugar is best described as an exemplar of magical realism told so confidently that it could almost be true. With…

The plot of Mammother moves quickly. Every page or two leads to another death or transformation in the town of Pie Time, the fabulist community where the novel is set, and the residents of this small town, who have little or no time to accept the calamitous position they are in, begin to adjust their lives to…

Pulsing at the center of Quintan Ana Wikswo’s lush new novel, A Long Curving Scar Where the Heart Should Be, is a huge white house on a hill—a house inhabited by three women, abandoned by the man they love, and the outcasts they succor. The house itself, “The Plantation, some still called it,” belongs to…

Hernan Diaz’s In the Distance is more than just an atypical Western: it’s also an atypical ‘New Western,’ charting out fresh territory even among those postmodern novels that appropriate the conventions of the classic Western for subversive purposes. It follows the misadventures of a young, wayward, and largely speechless Swedish emigrant who finds himself accidentally…

Appalachian fiction has a reputation for its split-knuckle prose, lean and raw, which pummels its reader into a vicarious experience of a hard-scrabble life in decaying towns, complete with heavy drinking and labor in the mines, lumberyards, or rail shops. This is the Appalachia that readers of J.D. Vance’s toxic Hillbilly Elegy have come to…