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.”…

Ben Hoffman, winner of both a fiction fellowship from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award, writes stories that are original, sometimes funny, and often illuminate the dynamics in family relationships that can make the reader feel simultaneously together and apart. His outstanding new chapbook, Together, Apart, is packed with daughters…

The title of Monica McFawn’s debut story collection, Bright Shards of Someplace Else, comes not from the title of one of the eleven stories, but from a character’s thought in one of the many moments of longing found in McFawn’s work. Marti, one of two older women who’ve given their lives over to caring for…

On August 6, 1945, the first nuclear bomb used in war destroyed Hiroshima, followed at Nagasaki three days later by the second. The first was code-named Little Boy, the second Fat Man. From this anthropomorphic nicknaming is born the pivotal conceit of Mike Meginnis’s poetically and morally luminous novel, Fat Man and Little Boy. After…

In Certain Circles was written in 1971, the last novel Elizabeth Harrower would write to date. By then she was the author of four other novels, including The Watch Tower, all very successful and well-received, and Harrower was being likened to Patrick White and Christina Stead. But In Certain Circles was to have a different…

Steve Himmer, editor A catalog of the narrator’s wine-soaked misadventures at readings and lectures by Booker Prize winners, How To Be A Public Author by Paul Ewen (aka Francis Plug), published by Galley Beggar Press, really may be the funniest novel I’ve ever read — it certainly drew me some concerned looks from my fellow…