The Inhabitants, a novel that takes place in a Gothic house, is a strange, eerie read. The action feels as if it were happening in another room, behind a velvet curtain.  The story follows artist and single mother Nilda Ricci, who inherits from her own mother a Victorian mansion rumoured to have been built by…

For most Americans, Fallujah conjures up images of dead Americans, their bodies burned in the street—images upon which the liberatory dreams of even the most starry-eyed were shattered. The name of the city is synonymous with—indeed, it is a metonym for—violent ruin. But Fallujah is more than a figure of speech. It is a city—one…

This daring and provocative story collection chronicles the lives of thirteen young Mexican women confronting remarkable hardships. The bold, unrepentant voices of Reservoir Bitches bait readers with moral dilemmas that undermine stereotypes—for instance, that women are inherently good and incapable of violence even when it’s necessary for them to survive and thrive.  Among the collection’s…

Cho Yeeun’s The New Seoul Park Jelly Massacre, translated from Korean by Yewon Jung, begins with the story of two lost children, Yuji and Jua. They meet at the Lost Children Center at New Seoul Park, an amusement park outside Seoul, after each has been separated from her parents. Yuji comforts Jua, who cries uncontrollably,…

The Producer, an important character in the first story in Meg Pokrass’ First Law of Holes: New & Selected Stories, isn’t really a producer at all. He’s a ninety-year-old man with “a hole in his heart,” who had wanted to produce a film but never did, and who is cheating on his wife with the…

Reading a book is like living a life. You start at the beginning, you move through experiences, and you eventually arrive at the end. Even as you read about, or meander through, the present moment, you are also always aware of your steady motion toward something else. In fact, your anticipation of what comes next—of…

Any good book teaches the reader how to read it. “The Sea,” the first story in Kirstin Allio’s Double-Check for Sleeping Children, does so by inviting the reader to participate in its meaning-making. The story’s wave-lapping lines reveal depths that shimmer with suspense and anxiety and are disorienting in the most dangerously delicious way. Enter…

With its catastrophe flicks, zombie outbreaks, raging kaiju, and sharks of unusual size, Hollywood sells an apocalypse bristling with frenetic promise: stories told at breakneck pace, punctuated with do-or-die moments, noble sacrifices, and glimmers of resilience. But disaster is always domestic, mundane—a study in the simple yet strange art of making it from one day…

In Fine Gråbøl’s What Kingdom, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken, the unnamed narrator, a woman who is patient at a psychiatric institution, examines the rituals of collective life against and with that institution. The novel’s three sections consist of vignettes that document the narrator’s day-to-day as well as her interiority, focusing on her…

When I sat down to read Diego Gerard Morrison’s Pages of Mourning, I was at a bar where two men were swapping stories. Twice, I heard “my beloved Mexico City” at the exact same moment that I read the words “Mexico City,” as if each of these men were briefly narrating the novel’s central geography.…

What’s it like to be young? Mostly it’s boring. The young student stares at her phone, eats poorly, stays up late, sleeps badly. There’s schoolwork, idols performing on livestreams, Starbucks drinks. Young love, with its exciting and uncertain intrusions into daily life, can play a starring role. But love is repetitive too. By incessantly texting…

To make a novel about a circus solemn and subdued is a singular feat, and one Franco-Swiss-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin accomplishes effortlessly in Vladivostok Circus. More interested in painting dreamlike landscapes and tapping into characters’ innermost isolation than in delivering a spectacular show, Vladivostok Circus drops readers in the starkness of the Russian Far…