In one scene of Alexander Payne’s film Nebraska, Woody, played by Bruce Dern, gives his wife and son a haphazard tour of the farmhouse in which he grew up. He isn’t a talkative docent, and falls into silence when the group comes to an upstairs bedroom. Woody eventually points out the spot where his brother died.…

The Pull of It, Wendy J. Fox’s first novel, is palliative care for the neurotic American attachment to routines of housekeeping, childrearing, and career building. For too long, the mundanity of middle-class life has received what John Updike calls its “beautiful due,” and in American fiction this has draped a pall of responsibility and resignation…

A note on the novel’s journey: The Silver Ghost was originally published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich in 1979. Kinder’s editor left Harcourt just before the book’s release, and with the move, Kinder’s novel, lacking a push from its publisher, received little attention. Robert Peluso and Jeff Condran from Braddock Avenue Books approached Kinder and asked if they…

A quick perusal of Jared Yates Sexton’s previous collections prompts one to consider the work of such distinguished American realists as Richard Ford or Raymond Carver, names that by this point serve as shorthand for a particular kind of story: one that centers on the adversities of a certain kind of down-and-out everyman. To Sexton’s…

Most undergraduates experience a few large, auditorium-bound science classes during their time in college. These introductory courses don’t require prerequisites, satisfy the university’s multidisciplinary checkboxes, and don’t involve much class participation, at least not in any meaningful way. They are exercises in anonymity: the professor will not get to know the students, and the students…

In his book Souvenirs and Other Stories, Matt Tompkins is able to bring magic to the mundane with his straightforward, simple prose. This collection of six stories includes fables, such as “The Water Cycle,” where a young boy’s father evaporates into a fog, tall tales, like “Seeking Advice And/Or Assistance Re: Mountain Lions,” in which a…

Why did you disappear into the sky? This gentle question enters the story about halfway through Ellen Prentiss Campbell’s novel, The Bowl with Gold Seams, in a quiet scene between a father, his daughter, and the narrator of the novel, Hazel, who is looking after the daughter in a way of sorts. In the novel it is…

Every page of Bull and Other Stories is grounded in diverse protagonists and settings, each a discovery to treasure. Kathy Anderson, winner of the 2015 Autumn House Fiction Prize, has crafted a set of stories that match their laugh-out-loud humor with powerful emotional effect. There are no weak links in the collection; the stories start strong and…

Your mother throws her breasts over her back when she’s cooking so they won’t bother her. She’s boiling corn, she’s shucking it over the stovetop and she’s half-naked. Her hair’s in a towel. It’s hissing. Your boyfriend sneaks up behind her and takes a wallop of a suckle. … Your mother is a mystery. You…

The thirteen short stories in Bystanders are filled with imperfect, guilt-ridden men and women at crossroads in their lives. Many are starved for change and want to make daring choices, yet shame, responsibilities, and self-loathing keep them trapped and unhappy. In their paralysis, they are spectators to accidents, hauntings, bad acts, and misplaced love. In “The Witness,”…

The characters in Jack Pendarvis’s short story collection Movie Stars laugh frequently, even in moments of pain and disquiet. In “Duck Call Gang,” the narrator and his wife wake up in the midst of a violent thunderstorm, screaming in terror, then erupt into laughter. But long after his wife falls asleep he lies awake wracked with anxiety.…

Set during the time surrounding 9/11, Tyler’s Last is a mesmerizing literary thriller that weaves together two intricate plotlines—one involving Eve, a famous crime writer also known as “the old lady,” conceived in the image of Patricia Highsmith, and another involving Eve’s favorite protagonist, Tyler Wilson. Tyler is an aging criminal whose life is rattled by Cal…