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,…

Eugine Lim’s third novel, Dear Cyborgs, is born into a climate of social and political unrest. Following the 2016 US Presidential Election, millions of Americans, and millions more around the world, have marched in protest against Donald Trump and his administration. It can’t be denied that these demonstrations have waned in the subsequent months. Still,…

Language and imagery of great originality are the most striking aspects of Melissa Fraterrigo’s Glory Days. Centered on the imaginary town of Ingleside, Nebraska, as it undergoes disruption and transition, the novel illuminates the broken lives that result from being cut off from the land and the once-vibrant farming and ranching culture that formed the…

Christos Chrissopoulos’s The Parthenon Bomber, a novella originally published in Greek in 2010, is about a criminal act and is structured like a case file. While the file includes information about the perpetrator (a troubled loner referred to only by his initials Ch.K), testimony from people who knew or observed him, a manifesto written by his…

Garréta, a member of Oulipo and author of the award-winning novel, Sphinx, begins with a question—what should she do to keep her readers engaged while they are waiting on her next novel? She creates a challenge for herself, to write something different. She conceives of a series of confessional essays based solely on her memories of women she…

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…