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…

Andrew Sullivan’s debut novel Waste takes place in fictional Larkhill, Ontario, circa 1989, a locale as hopeless and desperate and doomed as its citizens. The action occurs over a few frozen midwinter days and follows Jamie Garrison and Moses Moon immediately after an improbable accident: with Jamie behind the wheel of his Cutlass, they hit and kill…

The Best Small Fictions 2015 is an essential anthology, the first of a new series showcasing the best very short fiction, in a variety of forms, published in a single year. Fifty-five acclaimed and emerging writers, including Stuart Dybek, Michael Martone, Emma Bolden, Ron Carlson, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Rusty Barnes are among some of the…

Rachel May’s debut novel begins with a lush description of coastal Maine, then zeroes in on the insular, almost idyllic St. Christopher’s, a boarding school run by Benedictine monks two hours north of Portland. The scene describes a “windy pine-tree coast buttressed by smooth gray rocks…an ocean of white caps…a wide sloping green lawn…the lighthouse…

Loss might seem like a straightforward concept, until a writer like Amina Gautier shows us that it isn’t. The fifteen stories in her latest collection, The Loss of All Lost Things, dissect the experience of losing things – people, places, dreams, youth – describing loss in its many moods and variations. For the most part, these…