We’d rather believe he’s speaking figuratively: “Agnes is dead. Killed by a story.” So read the opening lines of a novel named for a maybe-dead woman. He (the nameless narrator) goes on to tell us that he and Agnes met nine months ago, at the Chicago Public Library. They became lovers. Reflecting on it now,…

Ellen Meeropol writes novels in the tradition of such authors as Barbara Kingsolver, Rosellen Brown, and Paule Marshall. Whether termed radical, political, or socially engaged, hers is fiction that addresses the impact of culture and politics on human relationships. Meeropol attacks issues head-on but with subtlety, posing complex ethical dilemmas in prose both literary and…

Slovene journalist Jela Krečič, known for her contributions to Slovenia’s national paper Delo, where she published her 2013 interview with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, has arrived with her first literary endeavor. None Like Her, a novel translated from the Slovenian by Olivia Hellewell, and one of the first titles in the Peter Owen World Series in association…

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…