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…

If you’re like me and my wife, you leave a nine page memo of instructions for the friend or family member who kindly agrees to take care of your cat when you are out of town. Sound familiar? No? The Cat Memo, as we refer to it, is divided into sub-sections, which include Food, Water,…

It is likely Lars Mørch Finborud
’s first book will not find many readers in America, compared to those that it has reached in his native Norway. One might hope he takes this as a compliment. In any case, it will be good if this prediction proves false, since this is the kind of book that…

Writing about a novel as distilled and incantatory as Aimee Parkison’s The Petals of Your Eyes, it is helpful to begin with specifics of setting and character. A missionary’s daughter and her sister have been captured and imprisoned in what is variously an orphanage, a museum of human curiosities, a brothel, and a sexual theater.…

Marie NDiaye’s Self-Portrait in Green (translated from the French by Jordan Stump) provokes many questions, not least of which is the question the reader must answer: who are the “women in green” who populate the book? They are mysterious figures, unreliable, cold, threatening, and fascinating. At different points, the woman in green – always in…

The men in Andrew Brininstool’s Crude Sketches Done in Quick Succession can’t seem to accept their new circumstances. They fight it, often with zealous immaturity, as if unaware of how ridiculous their attempts show them to be. In “Stick Figures” a man befriends a lapsed Mormon who pursues women with the tenacious verve of someone expending some…

Robert Vaughan’s collection, Addicts & Basements (read “attics” for addicts), is a book that takes place in two worlds; the above-ground, out-of-doors world of the first section, “Addicts,” and the otherworldly realm of the below-stairs, “Basements.” Vaughan Stretches his narrative muscles and explores the architecture of the human in these poems, flash fictions and prose…

The unnamed narrator of Marcos Giralt Torrente’s novel Paris has grown up painfully aware of the absence of his father. An occasional freelance translator and proofreader, when he wasn’t pursuing some scam or scheme, his father “was the kind of liar who, in order to conceal one lie, tends to make up a bigger one.”…