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…

A multigenerational saga, Sonya Chung’s The Loved Ones follows two families living (mainly) in Washington D.C. from 1951 to the early 2000s. After a brief prologue, the story begins near the middle, in the ominous year of 1984. With efficiency, Chung introduces Charles and Alice Lee, pioneers of interracial marriage who first met on a…

Alice Kaltman’s Staggerwing is best savored with a few bites of dark chocolate with chili pepper. It would complement the tone of the stories—bittersweet with a bit of a sting. A very balanced debut collection of eleven short stories, it’s hard to pick favorites. However, the author does unquestionably excel in first-person narration. The collection…

The Special Power of Restoring Lost Things, Courtney Elizabeth Mauk’s third novel, spans little more than a day in the life of the Bauer family, minus one. It has been a year since their twenty-year-old daughter, Jennifer, left a night club in the Lower East Side of Manhattan on the arm of a stranger. She…

I love honing the perfect little story—trying to create resonance and concise meaning. I love reading work that makes me feel something in such a short span. A story I can read over and over again and still feel something afterwards is the best thing ever. I feel like a lot of short-short fiction is…

Every historical novel is a bereft love letter, written to—and for—a ghost. In Dinitia Smith’s The Honeymoon, that spectral figure is George Eliot (the pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans) as she embarks on a career in letters, a twenty-six-year love affair with George Henry Lewes, and a late-in-life marriage to the young, charming John Walter…

Narrative craft has a history. Cave persons had no interest in abstraction or jumbled events, but in an age glutted with information, we have an appetite for nonlinear stories that explore, wander, and engage us with the world. The Sea-Wave by Rolli, a Canadian writer and visual artist, is a boundary-pushing work that invites multiple…

Blackass is a fresh and compelling exploration of blackness (and whiteness) in current-day Nigeria. A. Igoni Barrett’s debut novel balances strong roots in literary and cultural history with a comprehensive portrait of a twenty-first century life. When Furo Wariboko, a young black Nigerian man, wakes up white, it’s hard not to remember Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, who…

The Prose of the Mountains is an ode to and a chronicle of the life of the Moxeves, the Georgian mountaineers of the region of Xevi. Aleksandre Qazbegi (1848-1893) experienced it first-hand, living as a shepherd in the mountains for seven years. This episode is detailed in “Memoirs of a Shepherd,” the first of the three…