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…

Raul Castro and Barack Obama’s “Cuban Thaw” wasn’t the only historic milestone between Cuba and the United States in 2015. Thanks to new translations from Restless Books, American readers were also introduced to two of Cuba’s finest writers of science fiction. Like Obi-wan Kenobi and Han Solo, one author is a wizened grandfatherly figure, the…

The town of Dyson, Ohio, is dying. Once upon a time, it was a thriving community, buoyed by the town’s plastic fruit factory. But in this comedic novel, the town has moved on from its glory days, and its residents, in their quirky ways, attempt to bring it back to life. “Quirky” hardly begins to…

James Tate Hill’s Nilsen Prize-winning debut novel, Academy Gothic, is marketed as both hardboiled noir and academic satire, an unlikely combination that in the wrong hands might spell doom; after all, the detective genre has its fair share of recognizable tropes while satire can often be hit-or-miss. The thought of stuffing the two together risks overkill,…

Lina Meruane’s autobiographical novel is intense, lyrical, unsettling, and hard to put down. It draws the reader into the rhythm of events, at times precipitous, at others excruciatingly slow. The novel portrays the aftermath of a stroke that leaves the narrator nearly blind. Meruane appears by name in the novel, explaining how she condensed Lucina…

A Curious Land: Stories from Home is a collection of interconnected short stories, set primarily in Tel al-Hilou, a village in the West Bank in Palestine, spanning almost a century. A small church with a pock-marked statue of the Virgin Mary stands tall as if in protection over the village inhabitants. Some have been buried…

The place of art in the world has always been debated. Whether it’s a luxury of the elites or a universal language that can push humanity forward, its mainstream importance is often obscured by an air of exclusivity. But the subtle ways in which art can impact people and shape events occasionally come into sharp…

The central conceits in the writing of Tom Williams are the ideas of duality and alienation, people inhabiting two worlds without really fitting in with either. He explores this liminality in several ways. His first book, the novella The Mimic’s Own Voice, follows Douglas Myles, the last and greatest “mimic.” Myles has the ability to copy…

Is it in our nature to be predatory? The characters in Kristine Ong Muslim’s dystopian Age of Blight pose – and possibly answer – this question from such varied and imaginative corners that it’s difficult to choose an entrance into this inventive collection of short fiction. In “Jude and the Moonman,” though, there is a passage that…