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…

Part coming-of-age story, part romance, part family drama, the novel Still Alive by LJ Pemberton spans its untethered narrator’s life across cities, times, and tenses.  A young creative, V—short for Virginia, a fittingly American name given her cross-country travels—moves from her childhood home in Oregon to New York and then Los Angeles. Yet she returns…

Our editors share their recommendations for books to enjoy over the summer break.

Set mainly on an island in the Paraná Delta, Selva Almada’s Not a River, the final entry in a loosely connected trilogy, tells the story of a fishing trip gone wrong. On the trip are three men coping badly with a shared tragedy. Their trip repeats one from twenty years earlier, except old friends El…

Set in the richly diverse Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey, the seventeen stories in Annell López’s smart and compelling debut collection engage with identity, racism, family, self-worth, and intimacy. Her characters range from Dominican immigrants like herself to white gentrifiers, and from tweens to the nearly middle-aged. Virtually all are on trajectories that ride…

The Good Deed reads like history that has been written over and over; perhaps it is just that the stories are as old as time, and displaced women and children—mute and damaged survivors—have been given voices. Benedict’s harrowing narrative highlights the ways in which hope and home are brutally wrenched from these refugees; the only…

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…