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…

As writers, our art attempts to both impose order and to best it. We wrestle with the distinctions between poetry and prose as much as we strive to adhere to them. One writing construct with a long history (e.g. Whitman, Dickinson, Woolf) that seems to be experiencing a renaissance in contemporary literature is the hybrid…

Rushing back to Brooklyn to see her sick abuela, the young narrator of “How to Make Flan” wants to find a way to connect with her grandmother one last time. She wants more than anything else, however, to understand who her grandmother is. It’s not an existential question. “My hair is from Spain and my…

Joseph, the titular father in Evald Flisar’s hallucinatory coming-of-age novel, is a country doctor with a penchant for young female patients and mysterious experiments conducted in his basement laboratory. As inspiration for exploring the unconscious desires and anxieties of human existence, rural medicine has proven a generous muse. In Franz Kafka’s “A Country Doctor,” the…

One day, the unnamed narrator of Eduardo Lalo’s epistolary novel Simone begins to receive mysterious, unsolicited notes. Some are left on his windshield, others appear as emails from a beauty academy address. Signed “Simone,” in an apparent homage to the philosopher Simone Weil, the notes mostly contain unattributed quotations: As he watched the same towns…