How might a woman writer in Gilded-Age Boston break free from the authorial identity fashioned by her publisher and take control over not just her writing but her life?  Virginia Pye’s The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann is, at its core, a novel that centralizes women’s creative labor. Born Victoria Meeks and re-christened by her…

It is worth noting the absence of a question mark in the title of Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better. These stories do not ask sarcastically or bitterly why we feel entitled to feel better. Rather, the collection explores surprising moments that do offer a possibility of…

In coastal Catalonia’s wine country, families have owned vineyards for centuries. But the land was never completely devoted to grapes. Other crops have long provided sustenance and supplemented family incomes. As the monoculture that came with the twentieth century drove down profits, farmers took second jobs to support their vineyards. The death blow to the…

Sita in Exile is a surrealist painting made not on canvas but in words. From the opening lines, “The sun was horrific. It spread itself over the fjord like an overturned pot of buttermilk,” Rashi Rohatgi creates a disorienting world inhabited by Sita, an Indian American who has recently relocated from Chicago to Norway. As…

In The Corner of East and Dreams, Joan Connor’s sixth book, readers are intrepid travelers in the author’s fictional wilderness. At least half of the collection’s thirty stories are laced with fabulism, images and developments drawn from a deep well of allusion and myth. Connor’s prose is so precise and elegant, her fabulous fictional wilderness…

Reading Aimee LaBrie’s award-winning collection, Rage and Other Cages, is like hanging out with a whip-smart best friend who can read a room and throw out a zinger while everyone else is still shrugging off their coats. Unfiltered, cringy, hilarious, LaBrie’s stories center on women who can no longer contain the stew of regret, fear…

Almost a million people fled Lebanon during the 1980s, around a quarter of the country’s population. The love of Lebanon, including a profound desire to see it restored to the sophisticated, beautiful, fertile, and pluralist country they remember, runs through the veins of every Lebanese I know. In Ghassan Zeinedine’s debut collection of tales, that…

You don’t need to be a soccer fan to appreciate the game’s intrinsic drama. Nowhere is it more evident than in the penalty kick. At times the whole game can come down to a tense face-off between a kicker and a goalie—never mind how well or poorly both teams have played in the many minutes…

At the start of Holly M. Wendt’s compassionate debut novel, Heading North, two hockey players, who are also secret lovers, train on a frozen canal in the deep night. The setting shows the score: “the ice hums, a thin crack somewhere between them, an easing settle. The canal’s meter of water is the least of…

The virgin, the whore, the mother, the maid—these symbolic containers have long relegated women to harmfully confining roles that reinforce a patriarchal system desperately in need of disruption. Peach Pit: Sixteen Stories of Unsavory Women, an anthology edited by Molly Llewellyn and Kristel Buckley, challenges this system by allowing the female characters to be  not…

Blood Feast by Malika Moustadraf is a collection of stories told from the perspectives of Moroccan people navigating largely unceremonious yet indelible moments of their lives. The stories are remarkably transparent, in the sense that each story captures the raw experience of living as a working-class person, a woman, or a queer individual in a…

As Jazmina Barrera teaches both directly and indirectly, to weave is to compose. Her multifaceted debut novel Cross-Stitch initiates readers into the rich history and craft of needlework. For its narrator Mila (Mílada), the art simultaneously fuels and is fueled by close bonds with the women, her dearest friends, who form her inner circle: the…