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…

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…