And Then is the latest novella from Brooklyn-based writer and fiction editor of the Brooklyn Rail, Donald Breckenridge. The book presents itself as a collage of interwoven stories concerned with how our lives intersect in strange and sometimes esoteric ways, and how the past is never that far behind. And Then is a taut meditation…

The book begins in childhood, as a guileless girl runs out the door with her pocket money, passing a slouched, drunk neighbor on the stairs. When she returns, the man is surrounded by figures in white coats, a blood-soaked hat sits abandoned next to his lifeless body, and his “chance for a new day” is…

The dictionary presents two basic definitions of “weight”—one (the noun) concerned with mass, and the other (the verb) meaning to place importance on something. We weigh in with our opinions and weigh our options. Weights are both things that pin us down and things we must pick up and lug around. Buried within the word…

The debut from Publishers Weekly fiction reviews editor Gabe Habash, Stephen Florida, is different from so many other contemporary novels. Those differences will inevitably turn off some readers, but if you’d enjoy an intense dive into the consciousness of a vile yet fascinating narrator, this is your book. Dark, engrossing, and unendingly weird, Stephen Florida is a tribute to the…

João Gilberto Noll died this March at the age of 70. Widely known (at least for a writer of fiction) in his native Brazil, Noll’s reputation is only beginning to be made in the Anglophone world. Two Lines Press has just published a translation of his 1989 novel Hotel Atlântico. That book, along with a…

Set in the South during the 1970s, at the heart of Kat Meads’s In This Season of Rage and Melancholy Such Irrevocable Acts as These is change: a changing belief system, a changing setting, and a changing world altogether. Mawatuck County was “a British colony before an American colony, a Carolina colony before a Carolina…

A winner of the European Union Prize for Literature in 2012, Jana Beňová’s Seeing People Off (Plán odprevádzania) was published last month in a stunning English translation by Janet Livingstone. The novel’s subtitle, “A Manifest of the Quartet” refers to a foursome of young artsy types living in the Petržalka neighborhood of Bratislava, who have created a…

Even those readers who have never been to the Midwestern United States, never seen the plains of Kansas nor the peaks of the Ozark Mountains in Missouri, never dipped a fingertip in the ice-cold lakes of Illinois and Wisconsin, the wind cutting like the blade of a newly sharpened knife, will, after reading Casey Pycior’s…

In Refrigerated Music for a Gleaming Woman, Aimee Parkison takes the beautiful, the lyrical, the emotional, and pins it tightly to the horrific, the satirical, and a sense of existential terror—an unsettling juxtaposition that leaves the reader both full and empty, singing and weeping. The twenty-three sparse stories of this thin, 83-page tome may give the…

Berit Ellingsen’s Vessel and Solsvart is a collection of five short, dark fairy tales, full of richly imaginative story weaving, and beautifully poetic language. Each story has a slightly different tone, a different feel, but all share a sense of the magical, the bizarre, or the straight up weird. The collection opens with the titular “Vessel and…

“Mothers were supposed to be fair,” laments Mitsuki Katsura, a middle-aged woman tasked with caring for Noriko, her terminally ill mother. This relationship is the center of gravity in Minae Mizumura’s Inheritance from Mother, a novel that tests the ties between mothers and daughters, between wives and husbands. But this is also the tale of…

The North American debut of Saikat Majumdar’s Play House was originally published in India as The Firebird and short-listed for the 2015 Atta Galatta-Bangalore Literature Festival Prize in Fiction. Set in Calcutta in the mid-1980s, the novel follows young Ori’s obsession and fear over his mother’s career on the stage. From page 11, where, “On…