In the opening sentences of Steven Hendricks’s Little is Left to Tell, we are eased inside a tidy fairy tale. Mrs. Rabbit’s children are all “healthy and happy.” Their clothes and toys are all “arranged in their places.” Mother Rabbit is tending the garden and admiring her little ones through the window in the warm…

Dash in the Blue Pacific is the story of a man whose life is crashing down in every way imaginable. At the beginning of the novel Dash is traveling on an airplane trying to heal his troubled mind and broken heart. Dash has already fallen far enough in life that he has downgraded from taking…

For Armenian Americans who have read countless books dealing directly with the Armenian Genocide of 1915, this is a commemorative year we have mixed feelings about. Mournful of crimes that haven’t been atoned for in the past 100 years, we brace ourselves to be bombarded with images, reflections, and analysis of a terrible moment in…

There is, in most book reviewing guidelines, a rather strong feeling against playing games of “what if,” as in, this novel could have been good (or great) if. Writing about what a book “could have been” is seen as usurping the work of the novelist, in a sense, encroaching on the realm of the imaginative.…

There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.~ Edith Wharton So begins the novel, which won the French Prix des libraires in March 2013. The Goddess of Small Victories alternates between Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s and (relatively) modern-day USA. At the beginning of chapter 1, the reader meets Anna…

Steph Post’s debut novel, A Tree Born Crooked, shows a lot of promise. It is a good novel that might have been a great novella. The plot is slim, and Post paints each scene with the same level of detail, never backing out to switch between brushes. In some cases, this even treatment leads to…

It’s a bold authorial choice to write a novella to begin with, let alone a novella about a pair of drunken 19th century sailors and their not-so-latent homoerotic friendship. Gay shipmen on the open seas? When does McGlue the Musical come out? But there’s much, much more going on below deck with Moshfegh’s lyrical gutter…

In his films, the late director Robert Altman urged his actors to talk over each other. He wasn’t concerned with the audience absorbing every uttered syllable. Instead, he wanted to craft a wall of sound, wiring everyone with individual microphones. The scenarios felt genuine and claustrophobic. In these moments, Altman captured the way we speak…

Anna Katharina Hahn’s novel Shorter Days, long-listed for the German Book Prize in 2009, is told from the perspectives of a small group of residents—Judith , Leonie, Luise, and Marco—in a contemporary Stuttgart neighborhood. Sections from Judith and Leonie, two mothers of young children, alternate for the first half of the book until the pattern…

Chris Cander begins her new novel Whisper Hollow with an excerpt from Luke 12:2: “Nothing is covered up that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known.” Such precise words for a book that so ties up the reader in its intermingled stories, reveling in its ability to engross without heaping on…

The stories in Evelyn Hampton’s story collection, Discomfort, do not so much confront the idea or emotion of discomfort, but take it as an operating principal. Discomfort is the subject position from which these stories observe the world. As with much experimental fiction, when it is interesting, when it is successful, these stories deny the…

Erika T. Wurth’s debut novel sets a stark, provoking tone with the first sentence: “I was sitting around in the basement of yet another fucking drug fuck, when I decided to get nervous.” This is the reader’s introduction to Margaritte, a surly, hardened sixteen-year-old drug dealer. Along with her cousin Jake, Margaritte is desperately trying…