Jeff Lockwood’s novel Anomie opens with a mini parable about parable-telling. The page-long “prologue” shows Michael, the book’s protagonist, as a young boy, cocooned in his father’s arms and listening to the “story of Gookoosh” (a tale from his father’s Anishinaabe ancestry, an Indian people native to the Great Lakes region). His mother observes the…

Queen of Flowers and Pearls by Gabriella Ghermandi is a coming-of-age novel, an exploration of colonialism and war, and a study of cross-cultural conflict, but at its heart it’s a novel about storytelling. Ghermandi announces this theme in the novel’s opening sentence, spoken by the protagonist Mahlet: “When I was a little girl, I was…

With so much ink spilled over the dramas of boarding schools, it’s hard to imagine a story set at a picturesque institution in rural Massachusetts could possibly feel fresh. And yet, in The Half Brother, Holly LeCraw has created an insular world that explores relationships with people and places in an exciting, insightful way. Her…

Winner of the 2013 Grace Paley Prize, Bewildered collects ten stories that widen the cracks in conventional façades — pleasant neighborliness, self-sacrificing motherhood — to expose what squirms beneath. Though the stories vary in tone, theme, and subject, they’re unified by the author’s gift for the incisive one-liner, the wry observation that illuminates the whole.…

The Secret Games of Words, Karen Stefano’s debut collection of short fiction — and two pieces that at least look like poetry — is an inventory of failures, missteps, disastrous oversights and a roadmap to insanity. But tragedy is counterbalanced by insight, lies by stark-worded honesty. Timelines and causalities play such large roles in these…

Alison Wellford’s first novel, Indolence, is told in the first person by Maria, a sixteen-year-old American girl whose parents live in the South of France. She tells of her sexual awakening, passion, domination and attachment to an older man, Omar, at a time of intense emotional upheaval over the summer and autumn when her mother…

Greil Marcus describes the feeling of listening to pop music, when it is at its best, as “that moment when something appears out of nowhere, when a work of art carries within itself the thrill of invention, of discovery.” It is clear from the first sentences of James Brubaker’s collection, Liner Notes, that this is…

Sarah Gerard’s Binary Star is the type of slim, ambitious volume that can be too ethereal or convoluted to leave a lasting impression, a series of ideas rather than a polished product. But it opens with a flourish of creativity, introducing two main characters and the metaphor by which this work attempts to define them.…

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.…