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…

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,…