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…

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…