From the opening pages of The Disintegrations, the narrator asserts that he “knows nothing about death, absolutely nothing,” yet what follows is a sweeping chronicle of death that suggests a journey from ignorance to some hazy understanding of the afterlife. No greater knowledge of death is captured here, as language’s inability to decipher the void…

The most striking feature of Christopher Kang’s short story collection aside from its title, When He Sprang From His Bed, Staggered Backward, And Fell Dead, We Clung Together With Faint Hearts, And Mutely Questioned Each Other, a story in itself, is the subtitle advertising that the book contains 880 stories. Due to this startling number,…

Lucy Biederman’s wonderfully inventive first book re-imagines The Papyrus of Ani, from the Book of the Dead (ca. 1250 B.C.E.) in a brisk, 70-page collection of vignettes she calls “spells.” She transports the reader from ancient Egypt across 5,000 years to the United States and into a metaphorical present-day tomb: a Walmart store. Biederman’s “Underworld”…

While not every story in Planet Grim is set on planet Earth, the book delivers on the “Grim.” Alex Behr’s debut story collection is a gritty wonderland of junkies, burnouts, and dreamers, with most of its stories centered on the forgotten, drug-addled underworlds of the Pacific Northwest. Hidden among tech giants, microbrews, and sleek suburbs,…

Examining society’s ills via the metaphor of an apartment building is not a new venture, but it works every time: from J. G. Ballard’s High Rise to the Yacoubian Building of Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, from Bernard Malamud’s urban ghettos to the famous address of 11 Rue Simon-Crubellier in Paris by Georges Perec. The…

The opening of Beyond the Rice Fields, set in 19th-century Madagascar, evokes the mists of memory, of bittersweet childhood lost in time. Alternating chapters are narrated by Tsito, sold as a slave at the age of nine, and Fara, whose largely absent father purchased Tsito and left him with her mother and grandmother. An outsider to…

In After Coetzee: An Anthology of Animal Fictions, activist and scholar A. Marie Houser curates a provocative collection revealing the fissures of freedom and communication between human and nonhuman animals. By using J.M. Coetzee’s work on animals: Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and Elizabeth Costello as a springboard, she has amassed sixteen narratives, many from…

The “Difficult Man” is ubiquitous in fiction and pop culture. Male characters are influenced by John Updike’s original immoral post-war family man Rabbit Angstrom, Philip Roth’s navel-gazers, Raymond Carver’s alcoholics, and thoughtful criminals like Tony Soprano and Walter White. Siel Ju’s excellent novel-in-stories, Cake Time, subverts this trope to focus on the good and bad…

The simplest introduction for Baret Magarian’s The Fabrications is to say that it is a novel of satire for an era of irreality. It is a difficult task to satirize the absurd—Hunter Thompson’s observation comes to mind, that satire becomes impossible when reality itself becomes twisted—and one wonders on reading The Fabrications if the author…

The Things We Do That Make No Sense, Adam Schuitema’s second story collection, begins with a passage from one of Andre Dubus’ most famous stories, “A Father’s Story”: “For ritual allows those who cannot will themselves out of the secular to perform the spiritual, as dancing allows the tongue-tied man a ceremony of love.” This…

Near Haven opens with a confession from Sir Isaac Newton: “I can calculate the motion of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Matthew Stephen Sirois’s debut novel is split into four parts, and each begins with an apt epigraph. In due time, the Newton line proves to be a perfect overture for…

A word of warning: Aberrant is not for the faint of heart. If the man-eating plant from Little Shop of Horrors brings back unsettling memories, know that Marek Šindelka’s debut novel has something much darker in store. Rich and atmospheric, it comes as no surprise that Šindelka, already an award-winning poet in the Czech Republic,…