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…

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…