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The second printing of Megan Boyle’s defiantly unclassifiable 2011 volume, selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee, by avant-garde publisher muumuu house, affords an opportunity to reexamine one of the most innovative—and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…

The opening lines of Ethel Rohan’s short memoir Out of Dublin immediately signal the difficult subject matter that Rohan is about to tackle: Two-hundred-and-six bones hold the typical adult together. When we first arrive, our skeleton contains three hundred hard, slick parts the color of teeth, and then life takes out some bones. There is…

The Otherwise Fables by Oscar Mandel is a complete collection of the writer’s fiction, divided into three parts: “The Gobble Up stories,” “Chi Po and the Sorcerer,” and “The History of Sigismund, Prince of Poland.” Although the reader can recognize Mandel’s writing style throughout the collection, his style is subtly different in each part. There are…

J.A. Tyler’s Colony Collapse is a transformative book. In its opening paragraph, the narrator describes a moment where his brother hands him a note, a “white paper sea sailing a black ship,” which signals the narrator’s dying. The brother then becomes a deer and disappears into the woods. The book that follows concerns itself with…

An Untamed State is difficult to read. This isn’t a plot or character issue, nor a problem of challenging vocabulary. What makes the novel difficult is the content, and especially the way Gay approaches the content: with full-forced, head-on, unapologetically clear writing about the kidnapping and rape of a young mother. The result is a…

Leave your husband when he hurts you, use ice cold butter in your pie crust, and accept that truth is harder to pluck from history than a feather from a fresh turkey. These are just a few of the lessons learned in Ellen Cooney’s novel, Thanksgiving, a book that follows the women of the Morley…

The Reluctant Cannibals is Ian Flitcroft’s first novel. The story is set in Oxford in 1969—far enough from the present day to allow a certain suspension of disbelief over the characters’ behaviour and significant, as Flitcroft has said, because the field of scientific cookery was thought to have been born in 1969 when Nicholas Kurti,…

Jonas T. Bengtsson’s A Fairy Tale is set up less as a narrative of linear events (although this is more or less its structure) and more as a series of questions—each with an increasing challenge—offered to the reader. The narrator, who is a six-year-old boy when the book opens, is not the kind of narrator…