Dave Reidy’s The Voiceover Artist explores the complicated relationship between two brothers: Simon Davies, a voiceover artist, and Connor Davies, an improv comedian. Even though they both seek to make careers of their voices, they cannot find the words to resolve the conflicts between them that have grown since childhood, which Simon spent silent —…

Erin Fitzgerald’s debut novella is, first and foremost, an ode to crying out into the techno-void during this early part of the internet age. If it’s possible to sum up the book in just one line, it’d have to be: Valletta78 is the story of people who need people but keep them forever at arm’s…

The song “Crepuscule with Nellie,” dedicated to Thelonious Monk’s wife, received its title from Monk’s mistress. The composition took time. Monk wanted to get every note right. When he felt he finally did, he planned to call it “Twilight with Nellie.” Monk’s mistress, Nica, a Rothschild and baroness, just happened to be in the room.…

Salvador Elizondo’s Farabeuf is a Mexican novel published during the boom years of magical realism, yet it has very little to do with that style of writing. The book is subtitled The Chronicle of an Instant, a choice of phrase which neatly encapsulates the writer’s intention, with the reader enticed into, and then trapped inside,…

Readers of the 2015 Flash Fiction International anthology, the latest in an intermittent series edited by James Thomas and Robert Shapard (who have published work by this reviewer), will find length a narrow standard for judging the qualities and effects of flash, or ultimately any type of fiction. Along with co-editor Christopher Merrill, Thomas and…

The Last Pilot by Benjamin Johncock is a sobering exploration into the bleakest regions of the Earth and the heart alike. The novel takes place in the Cold War Era, and the space race is in full force. America needs to respond to and exceed the success of Russia’s Sputnik: the satellite which not only…

The opening of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth is intriguing: “I’m the best auctioneer in the world, but no one knows it because I’m a discreet sort of man.” Most of the novel is narrated by Gustavo Sánchez Sánchez, better known as Highway. Later portions are narrated by Jacobo de Voragine, Highway’s “dental…

My Father is an Angry Storm Cloud is a curious collection of tales. Taken as a whole, the stories present themselves as a loose coalition of rivals vying for the title of standout. Fortunately, there is some competition for this spot, and through her broad stylistic range, Melissa Reddish turns the predictable on its head…

The culmination of nine years of writing, The New York Stories is an unusual collection in a number of ways. Set around the small, rural-New York town of Two Rivers, these stories appeared in three previously published volumes — Repetition Patterns, So Different Now, and After the Flood — and are gathered here for the…

In John Lane’s latest book, Fate Moreland’s Widow, small mill town politics in the 1930s are explored through the lens of one localized tragedy. Carlton, South Carolina, becomes a hotbed of union action when the local mill boss targets workers shortly before being involved in a shadowy and mysterious accident. Privilege, politics in a changing…

Lynn Sloan’s debut novel Principles of Navigation explores the uncertain terrain of marriage through the eyes of Alice Becotte, a newspaper reporter. Alice lives in Haslett, a small town in Indiana, a town that she settles in with her husband Rolly when he lands a tenure-track job in the art department at a small local…

Equal parts rumination on starting over in middle age, a love song to Copenhagen, the tale of a man belatedly growing up, and a mystery story, Beneath the Neon Egg, the final installment in Thomas E. Kennedy’s Copenhagen Quartet, follows its Irish-American protagonist, Patrick Bluett, through the course of a winter in Copenhagen as he…