Lou Gaglia’s debut collection Poor Advice opens with epigraphs from Ring Lardner and Aldous Huxley, and in many ways, Gaglia’s gritty and off-kilter stories pay homage to both. However, if we were to play the game of literary family trees—complete with anachronistic couplings and biological impossibilities—Gaglia’s work is more closely the descendant of Raymond Carver and Sam…

Heather Fowler’s Beautiful Ape Girl Baby is a tale of self-discovery, a comedic road trip, a discourse between humanism and naturalism—and of course the birth of a memorable new character, Beautiful. Beautiful has been kept like a ballerina in a music box for the first seventeen years of her life with mentors, tutors, and live-in “friends,” all…

The stories in Gilbert Allen’s The Final Days of Great American Shopping progress chronologically over a century, beginning in the early 1980s and ending in 2084, and although marketed as a short story collection, anyone could brand this a novel and be spot on. Structured much like Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad, these stories present…

HAH, by the Turkish writer Birgül Oğuz, is described as a short story collection that reads like a novel. But coming in at just over ninety pages, this novella of linked prose narratives defies conventional forms. The book won the 2014 European Union Prize for Literature and the translation from Turkish to English is a…

With The Crucible back on Broadway, the TV series Salem slated for a third season, and Radiohead’s latest single, “Burn the Witch,” it seems we are in the season of the witch hunt. Add to this list Julia Franks’ debut novel Over the Plain Houses, in which Irenie Lambey, shirking her prescribed role as the subdued wife of a preacher,…

The great pleasure in reading this book comes from the contrast between the erudite and polyglot Mircea Eliade, philosopher and professor of comparative religion at the University of Chicago, and the awkward, geeky adolescent he portrays in this lightly disguised memoir of his high school years. For those unfamiliar with the life and works of…

Yi Shun Lai’s Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadventures of Marty Wu is the story of a young Taiwanese-American woman living in Manhattan seeking her place in the world through self-help books. Marty, the story’s protagonist, quickly learns that personal sovereignty often follows in the wake of misunderstandings, destruction, and loss. Through Marty’s poor choices and bumbling…

War, So Much War is a short novel following the travels of Adrià Guinart, a Catalan youth who, desperate to escape his stifling world, leaves home at the age of fifteen to offer his services as a soldier. In truth, though, the war plays a minor role in the boy’s experiences. Adrià roams far and wide,…

Esther Gerritsen’s latest novel, her sixth in total and second to be translated into English, opens with a familiar scene. Late at night, a pair of police appear at Roxy’s doorstep to deliver a bit of bad news: her husband is dead. To complicate matters, he died along with a young woman who was both…

Juventud shatters expectations in the most satisfying ways. The book is a first novel from Vanessa Blakeslee, whose 2014 story collection Train Shots won an IPPY Gold Medal. The work is also an interesting and well-executed departure for Curbside Splendor. While many of the press’s other titles are geared toward gritty American life, the majority of Juventud takes place in Santiago de…

Every few years there is talk of displacing the 850 residents of Christiania, the famed and self-proclaimed anarchist village within Copenhagen, to make way for modern development. But thus far, Christiania’s time-warped dream is still open for business. In Fred Leebron’s mini-novel, Welcome to Christiania, one of the commune’s hash pushers personifies Christiania’s past, present, and…

Many of us daydream about escaping the day to day monotony. When set in a routine, there is comfort in dreams of running off and leaving it all behind, or curiosity about who we would be with other people and how we would look through their eyes. In Matthew Vollmer’s latest collection, Gateway to Paradise, his…