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…

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,…