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…

Josefine Klougart is a young Danish author (born in 1985) whose work is highly regarded in Scandinavia. Her style privileges images and language over narrative, and her work has been compared to that of Virginia Woolf and Marguerite Duras. Readers who are interested in plot- or character-driven narrative will not find either in Klougart’s work.…

Deepak Unnikrishnan’s novel Temporary People begins with a foreword in which he explains how he moved from the United Arab Emirates to the United States. In that process he apparently became an ‘immigrant of fortune’. The UAE though, is a country where 80% of the population are foreign nationals and have temporary citizenship, to help…

A quarter of a way into Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter the following stand-out line surfaces amidst a collage of anecdotes related to memorializing, burial practices, and grief writing: What does it mean to write what is not there. To write absence. The line sits on its own, separated out from a preceding block of…

Our editors share some of the books — new and old — that had our attention in 2017. + Helen McClory, fiction editor emerita I have read many excellent, punching, twisting books this year, notably Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You : Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, Patty Yumi Cottrell’s…