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…

As children, many readers grow up on classic tales of thrilling adventures and triumphant heroes. By contrast, the stories in Like a Champion are all about defeat. Vincent Chu’s debut collection from 7.13 Books is a celebration of the loser for whom life is a constant struggle. But instead of pointing and laughing at these…

Sports reveal those who play them. Think of your days as a gymnast, or a little leaguer, or a pee-wee football player. Did you, as some characters in Meagan Cass’ debut collection ActivAmerica do, pass the ball as soon as you received it, too afraid to fail to score? Did you lift weights to sink…

In her debut novel, Marlena, Julie Buntin dismisses any notion of suspense almost immediately. Cat, the novel’s retrospective narrator, reveals that Marlena, the reckless and pill-addicted seventeen-year-old she befriends upon moving to rural Michigan, dies at the end of the first summer the two spend together. By the end of the novel, readers have seen…

A frequent motif in noir stories is escape. Oftentimes, such tales center on damaged individuals struggling to outrun a dark past or evade a future of doom—and the three characters at the heart of The Hummingbirds, Ross McMeekin’s debut novel, fit that bill. Ezra, Sybil, and Grant come to Hollywood in search of a more…

Marie NDiaye’s My Heart Hemmed In is a brilliant account of the fluidity of perception, the deterioration of social bonds, and the (non-spiritual) grace of humility. Though originally published in France in 2007—a decade before the current nationalistic inclinations of the western world—it slyly details the tragedy and absurdity of humanity’s dire need to assign…

In the short span of a novella, A Place of Timeless Harmony peels back the layered vulnerabilities and illusions of a couple on an illicit getaway to the hostile Serengeti wilderness. An intimate and marvelously-detailed work by Curt Erikson, A Place of Timeless Harmony won the Clay Reynolds Novella Prize in 2016 and was published…

Forcing people to live in a gilded cage in order to harvest their organs and experiment on them: not a particularly original plot for a dystopia, of course, but still a fascinating vehicle for social critique. Swedish author Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit, like Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) or the film The Island (2005), tells the story of middle-aged…