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…

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…