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…

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…