In the titular story of Lynn Schmeidler’s debut collection Half-Lives, a poetry teacher whose half-formed twin lives like a monster in her uterus, visits a nuclear power station with her students. She calls the creature the Hydra, after the mythical beast that grows two heads for each one that’s severed, and it is both her…

Translated from the French by Rhonda Mullins, Pale Shadows by Dominique Fortier follows up on the author’s previous novel, titled Paper Houses in English, about the life of the poet Emily Dickinson. Interestingly, the new novel begins not with the poet, but with her sister, Lavinia, as she tends Dickinson’s dead body. Beginning a sequel…

Isaac Babel (1894-1940) didn’t write an awful lot—his untimely execution didn’t help—but in much of what he did write, he chronicled, with consummate craft, energy, empathy and humour, the experiences of Jewish men coming of age in the Pale of Settlement, on Tsarist Russia’s western edge, from the Black Sea to the Baltic. Manya Wilkinson’s…

The stories in Amina Gautier’s The Best That You Can Do, her fourth collection, pour forth in a headlong rush, with a rhythm as propulsive and natural as breathing. Gautier’s inhales and exhales can jump rope, or sit alone at a bar, or be held, clenched in fear, in an elevator full of white cops…

Last year, I read Andre Dubus III’s Such Kindness (2023) and Daniel Gumbiner’s The Boatbuilder (2018), two novels featuring characters who have made bad decisions and are, at times, extremely unlikeable. While reading these novels, I sometimes asked myself if I wanted to keep going. The stories in Ross McMeekin’s Below the Falls altogether evoke…

Chameleons have sticky-licky tongues, cone-shaped eyes that move independently, and bodies that change color based on their mood. Through nine sections built of vignettes drawn from history and imagination, A Life in Chameleons traces the life of Italian quick-change artist Leopold Fregoli (1867-1936), also known as Il Camaleonte (the chameleon), who specialized in appearing as…

In this debut novella, two sisters take off on a road trip through the New Mexico desert following the death of their mother, Bonnie, whose ashes, they feel, have been sitting in a jar for too long. The journey provides Gloria and Kit with both an escape and a purpose. Unfolding this story, Burner explores…

Lovelier, Lonelier, follows four peculiar and uniquely unsettled young people over several decades and multiple continents. Yam’s writing is bewitching, and his narrative a web of parallel stories, but his themes are classic and familiar: loss, failure, ambiguity, and the meaning of love. With this sweeping group portrait, Daryl Qilin Yam suggests that love can…

A singular focus on the tension between you and me—more specifically, between where I end and you begin—binds the novella and fifteen fictions of Àngel Bonomini’s belated English-language debut, The Novices of Lerna. In these tales, egoists unsuccessfully confront their doppelgängers, maniacs attempt to stand out, and confident young denizens of Buenos Aires lose themselves…

Brooke Shaffner’s Country of Under tackles the social issues that shape identity and belonging. Immigration is the novel’s heartbeat, propelling its main characters, two misfit teens named Pilar and Río, into situations that ultimately help them to better understand themselves in relation to the immigration-related struggles that have shaped their lives.  The teens have everything…

Reading a book about reading books is like entering a hall of mirrors: the experience is at once fascinating and disturbing. Like other stories about books and writing, The Book Censor’s Library drags the reader into itself, claiming to be one kind of book but unexpectedly (and imperceptibly) turning into another. Even the title throws…

To call prose cinematic is often to imply that its descriptions are heavily visual, focused on surfaces more than interiorities, and rich with sweeping panoramas, vivid colors, and dramatic action. Not here. While thoroughly cinematic, the forty-four stories in Terese Svoboda’s The Long Swim are shaped by techniques of the editing room more than the…