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.…

Our contributors and editors share some of the books we were excited about in 2016. + Aram Mrjoian Of This New World by Allegra Hyde: This year marks the first time I’ve read more pages worth of short stories than novels. As I read numerous anthologies and a slew of journals, Allegra Hyde’s debut collection…

Anuk Arudpragasam’s The Story of a Brief Marriage relates the bare essentials of being human and subject to time and space. Long passages about shitting, pissing, and, most prominently, breathing accrue to an unsentimental saga of refugee life in war-torn Sri Lanka. In it one can discern a distress signal to our desensitized species, an…

László Krasznahorkai opens the flood gates with his prose, offering sentences that can start calm and reflective before quickening the pace of his clauses like a stream morphing into rushing rapids. His settings have grown from personal, localized, and brutal to worldly and enchanting. His themes, which used to focus on the effects of the…

J’Lyn Chapman’s Beastlife is a collection in five distinctly different parts; two of these parts are prose, or perhaps prose poems, and three are essays. Some of the passages concern nature (human and animal). It includes illustrations, and among those are photographs of birds (some dead on the street, others dead and mounted in 19th-century…