With Leyna Krow’s story collection, I’m Fine, But You Appear to Be Sinking, Featherproof Books has succeeded in their stated mission to publish “strange and beautiful fiction.” Both strangeness and beauty play a big role in these pages—as do humor and heart and honesty. Call it strange or innovative, but tucked in between the table of…

Oh, Millennials. Gen X’s little buddies, who took our legacy of dissipation and doubt and made poetry of it. Our two generations: lives without world war, full of media, parents who are obliged to work a lot to stay afloat, economic lives debt-ridden at age eighteen. Gen X witnessed the flame (though not the warmth)…

Were Yoram Kaniuk to change that age-old adage about the only guarantees in life, he might have revised it to death and illness. A largely autobiographical novel, Between Life and Death is the final book published by the prolific Israeli writer. It can be read as a sort of comedy of errors, with Yoram’s body…

About his 1980 novel Antwerp, Chilean author Roberto Bolaño once said: “I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they’re outside of time, are the only ones with time.” In an age of closing borders and building walls, it is no surprise that Viet Thanh Nguyen, author of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Sympathizer,…

It’s rare to read a book as brave and brilliant as Israeli author Nava Semel’s Isra Isle, a book that defies classification. Is it a detective novel, a la Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union? Is it a historical novel, rooted in the real life of Mordecai Manuel Noah, an American journalist and visionary, who in…

Rachel Hall’s Heirlooms is a series of related stories set in France during World War II and in the US and Israel in the decades following. Characters reappear across the fifteen stories that make up the collection, and their development across time produces a satisfying, cumulative effect. Throughout the collection, there is a sense of…

In Their Arms, the second novel by UK-born writer Thomas Moore, brings to mind the transgressive fiction of the late ’80s and early ’90s, when writers like Bret Easton Ellis and Dennis Cooper shocked the literary world with their cool nihilism and frank, often violent depictions of sex. Both Cooper and Ellis were among the…

Michael Landweber’s Thursday 1:17 p.m. is an Eleatic thought experiment. Parmenides of Elea believed that reality (“what-is”) was timeless, unchanging, unmoving and it was only our illusory experience of it that was in flux. The world only seemed to flow on, progressing toward some human end, when in reality, it was static, frozen in an…

The Icelandic writer Oddný Eir is difficult to pin down: philosopher, visual artist, archaeologist, publisher, historian, and environmental activist. She’s a brilliant thinker, diving into as many interests as one person possibly can. Land of Love and Ruins is a reflection of her multifaceted nature. While labeled as fiction, the book is enjoyably outside genre…

Dystopian stories have recently been en vogue, but Kiini Ibura Salaam’s collection of speculative fiction, When the World Wounds, strays from imagining the bitter end and instead considers the personal or communal challenges of healing once disaster strikes. Salaam’s handful of stories finds characters approaching brutal moments of trauma or dealing with its direct aftermath.…

HBO’s Stranger Things combines a wonderful 80s Midwestern environment and the engaging narratives of early-teenage protagonists with a standard, unremarkable monster story that would have been utterly tacky and silly were it not for the whole thing being a joy. Jack Buck’s collection of micro-fiction, Deer Michigan, is like Stranger Things. This is micro fiction,…

What is a Winterling? Or, in the novel’s original Spanish, an Invierna? The word might suggest, among other things, lambs born in their winter pens. It might also suggest certain early blooming flowers—winter aconite, for example—that thrive under bare forest canopies but will quickly die back into their bulbs once the trees come into leaf.…