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the events described in the book and published in 1996, there is no danger of this first English translation feeling out of date.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…

Marinko Koščec’s A Handful of Sand is the autopsy of a passionate love affair. An artist and a publisher from Zagreb recount the stories of their lives leading up to the day they first met, weaving present and past, fantasy and self-analysis into a humane and utterly convincing novel. At the same time it is…

When joining a new community, we inherit its history and try to insert ourselves into an established web of relationships. We find ourselves interacting with people who might otherwise remain strangers, and we take great care to cope with their territorial instincts and demands, the accusations that we’re killing their grass or parking our cars…

Sad Robot Stories by Mason Johnson is a novella about the act and power of storytelling. It follows Robot, a machine who doesn’t fit in with his fellows in a post-apocalyptic world where humans and animals are extinct. He’s so different from the other robots that they fail to understand his difference. He’s sensitive, empathetic,…

The second printing of Megan Boyle’s defiantly unclassifiable 2011 volume, selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee, by avant-garde publisher muumuu house, affords an opportunity to reexamine one of the most innovative—and largely overlooked—literary creations of the past decade. The work’s initial appearance was largely ignored by the mainstream critical establishment; arguably…

Peter Stjernström’s latest novel The Best Book in the World is something of a chimera: as well as the story of what might happen when two authors compete to write the best book in the world, it’s also a satire of the publishing world and an exercise in metafiction. The plot is relatively straightforward. One…