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…

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…