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…

Our contributors and editors share some of the books we were excited about in 2015. + Michelle Bailat-Jones Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation (Other Press) was a definite highlight of my reading year. It gave me the chance to reread Camus’s The Stranger and think about how a writer gives a “voice” to a particular…

The Death of a library is slow. Books are pulled from the shelves in an order like teeth leaving the mouth. The Sorrow Proper by Lindsey Drager is a quiet novel of great precision and fine beauty that should be read properly in a quiet library or improperly in a quiet bar surrounded by a…

Grant Faulkner is a contradiction. Executive Director of National Novel Writing Month, which challenges participants to complete a novel in one month, he also co-founded the journal 100 Word Story. He understands the value of both: the frenzy in pursuit of word count and the meticulous compression of story. In Going Long. Going Short., from…

Jerry Gabriel’s debut collection, the Mary McCarthy prize-winning Drowned Boy, compiled a set of linked stories that worked magnificently as stand-alone pieces, but taken together as a whole, the collection read like a novel. In Gabriel’s second collection, The Let Go, the seven stories each read as something close to condensed novels, with perceptive character…

Tristano Dies is the latest in the collection of works by Italian writer Antonio Tabucchi published by Archipelago Books. The novel takes place in Italy one hot August, with a successful author visiting Tristano, a hero of the Second World War Italian resistance. Having already imagined parts of the man’s life in a short work,…

The vivid settings of Elizabeth Gonzalez’s stories in The Universal Physics of Escape illuminate the strangeness of the world. There is an abandoned mining town filled with sulfuric hot spots that “glow like so many dying campfires,” an ancient gargantuan cave filled with “sugar in a great waterfall frozen overhead” and flowstone “like a herd…

I read the majority of Janice Lee’s Reconsolidation on the floor of a grimy hotel bathroom. My reading was continually interrupted by surges of nausea. I broke mid-sentence, lunging for the toilet, then returned to the same sentence, reassembled where I was. In many ways, I feel this reading situation helped me experience the trauma…

The stories in Rebecca Lawton’s Steelies and Other Endangered Species are set in motion by a sense of stewardship: a concern for wild places and the beings — human and animal — who inhabit those places. A collection of fifteen linked stories, Steelies finds its strength in the webs of connection between characters as well…