The stories in Long Hidden summon the fabulist landscape of remote lands and rare creatures of myth, give or take a zombie and a couple of werewolves. For all its rollicking and twisting plots, most of the stories are embedded in critique: confronting and overturning the notion that magical agency belongs only to those who…

The stories in Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut collection, Every Kiss a War —full of adoration and loss and infidelity and sex and mistakes and memory and regret—prove that, sometimes, an author can unearth the perfect title to represent her work as a whole, for within this assemblage, Cross-Smith crafts twenty-seven glimpses into the lives of those…

The first bit of front matter a reader encounters opening Twisted Spoon Press’ new English translation of Bogdan Suceavă’s Miruna, A Tale is not a title page, or a copyright page, or a list of the author’s titles to date. It is a black page ornamented at its center with an intricate series of concentric…

“Family will always kill you – some bit by bit, others all at once. It is the love that does it.” “History could do that, change a person’s name. History was something so simple and insistent that none of us has escaped it.” Tiphanie Yanique’s novel Land of Love and Drowning intertwines these two themes—the…

Jean Ferry (1906-1974) was a French screenwriter who worked with Cluozot and Bunuel, a minor figure in the surrealist movement and also an essayist known for his criticism on Raymond Roussel. His only book of published fiction, The Conductor and Other Tales, which appeared in 1953, was only translated in-full as of last autumn. The…

In the summer of 2011, science writer Meera Lee Sethi, who was then based in Chicago, spent nine weeks as a volunteer field assistant at Ånnsjöns Fågelstation, a bird observatory located in the mountains of Jämtland in Sweden. In the collection of seventeen short natural history essays that came out of that experience, Mountainfit, Sethi…

The growing popularity of Clarice Lispector—thanks in no small part to the efforts of translator-biographer Benjamin Moser—has opened a larger space for translated fiction by women such as Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares. Lispector, Tavares, and their translators continue the fight for gender equity in publishing by exploding many of the facile dichotomies that publishers and marketers…

Not the End recounts how the death by drowning of Maud Smith, aged 88, off the Devonshire coast, affects the lives of three people who had never met her (alive). Kate Vane introduces her characters in quick succession. We meet Neil (cemetery manager), Trevor (owner of the flat where she lived), Brenda (who found Maud’s…

One of the core doctrines to emerge from the famous Bauhaus school in Weimar was the idea of the architectural Gesamtkunstwerk. By definition, it is a total work of art, wherein multiple forms in multiple media are composed together to create one great, harmonious work; the architect designs the floorplan, the furniture, commissions the art,…

In 2013, a Berlin-based micro-press called Readux Books launched the first of their “teeny books”. There are twelve of these hand-sized publications, released in three sets of four; the latest four were just released in June. As might be expected from its European center of operations, Readux is interested in contemporary European literature in translation…

Here is some of what you can expect to find in rob mclennan’s new book of stories: “A vegetarian, he claimed, not because he loved animals, but because he hated plants.” I’ll go ahead and say it for him. You’re welcome. But someone browsing the pages of mclennan’s The Uncertainty Principle before buying may make…

Growing up in Los Angeles can’t be easy. Between realistic catastrophes, like fires and earthquakes, and the unreal but no less alarming dramas offered by the entertainment industry, it can be hard to stay in touch with ordinary reality. In An Unsuitable Princess, Jane Rosenberg LaForge, a Los Angeles native, combines imaginative narrative and personal…