With a tongue-in-cheek title like A Moody Fellow Finds Love And Then Dies, you might think Douglas Watson’s first novel is just another sad and funny tale tall on charm, but short on consequences. Published by Outpost19, an indie house that promises “provocative reading,” A Moody Fellow Finds Love And Then Dies is more than…

Dark secrets are held below the murky surface of Letitia Trent’s debut novel, Echo Lake. The author’s previous outings with her two published poetry collections have served her well when evoking a textured landscape that is full of lurking trouble and withheld memories. The language, even when describing minutiae, feels tactile, which is suitable for…

Imagine if W.G. Sebald numbered his paragraphs. Imagine if he shucked many of those long, discursive takes on architecture and history. And imagine he abandoned his peripatetic plots and instead wrote about doomed and melancholy lovers. Perhaps this gives something of the aesthetic flavor of Álvaro Bisama’s novel Dead Stars, published in Spanish in 2010,…

Kim Church’s novel Byrd chronicles the life of a woman, Addie, who chooses to give her son up for adoption after she is left with an unwanted pregnancy. The book provides a meditative inner monologue addressed to her biological child. Addie starts the story off with a letter to her son, recalling the night she…

Vanessa Blakeslee’s short story collection Train Shots contains such an array of characters and settings that it seems challenging at first to find any through-line among the eleven pieces. These stories take us to rural Pennsylvania, Costa Rica, Florida, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, among other places, and include train engineers, fast food restaurant employees,…

I bristle at the subtitle—“a tale”—appended to this edition of Marcelle Sauvageot’s fascinating document, Commentary. Party I bristle because “tale” seems, in the context of this otherwise lucid and glowing translation by Christine Schwartz Hartley and Anna Moschovakis, an unusually quaint and antiquated rendering of “récit.” But my unease with the appellation has less to…

We weren’t running toward anything, except a destination chosen at random because we could see it from a distance, and we weren’t running away from anything, except what was behind us and wherever we were a minute ago, but it felt like I’d never felt so motivated. In Backswing, Aaron Burch’s wonderful full-length story collection…

Voices of Our Nation Arts Foundation, more commonly known as VONA, was founded in 1999 by Elmaz Abinader, Junot Díaz, Victor Díaz and Diem Jones. Envisioned as a supportive space for writers of color, the program remains the only writers’ conference in the country with a multi-genre focus on writers of color as both students and…

At a compact 216 pages, A Shelter of Others concerns the release of Mason Laws from prison, and split into three sections, the novel focuses not only on the trials of Mason’s freedom but on how his reemergence affects the lives of his estranged wife, Lavada, and aging father, Sam. Early on, the novel tends…

We all intermittently lose our internal compass, whether it’s from the physical disorientation of a new environment, or the psychological confusion concurrent with hunting for glories long passed. In these situations, logic clashes with ego, producing a mindset unable to see the proverbial forest from the trees, trapping an individual without the need of a…

The Siege of Sarajevo forms the backdrop for this collection of six stories by Alma Lazarevska. Written during the events described in the book and published in 1996, there is no danger of this first English translation feeling out of date. We need no geographical or historical details to grasp the timeless quality of these…

Ravi Mangla’s Understudies is brief (141 pages), the cover an unassuming cobalt blue with a black teardrop in the middle (a peephole, perhaps?). Two central characters, including the anti-hero narrator, don’t have names. The book is told in a series of numbered vignettes, each one about the length of a short flash-fiction. The structure creates…