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…

Through a journey that minutely, carefully, and assuredly tears at the sinews of reality, David Hartley’s 13-piece flash fiction collection Threshold transports the reader into an eerily strange landscape. Occasionally darkly hilarious, frequently sinister, always poignant, the stories act as brief but beautifully descriptive tourist postcards to a neighbor’s garden, outer space, alternative worlds, and…

Mason Radkoff’s sometimes luminous debut novel, The Heart of June, recounts a late-bloomer’s coming of age. Walt Farnham, a grad school dropout in his mid-forties who lives in an apartment above his ex-wife’s garage, supports himself by half-assedly doing renovations and carpentry in a historic section of Pittsburgh. Readers meet Walt at an awkward moment…

When does one grow up? Do the achieved milestones of an adult life equal maturity? In Conquistador of the Useless Joshua Isard gives us Nathan Wavelsky, a man in his early thirties. He has a decent, if unfulfilling, job. He’s not particularly motivated, and he possesses no driving passions beyond reading, listening to music, and…

Read enough Southern Literature and you’re bound to recognize more than a few of the trademarks of the genre. Read enough of the hackneyed, contrived version of Southern Literature and you’re bound to be introduced to a clichéd and derivative rendering of the genre, one that milks every chance to wring a little more out…

Despite its brevity (86 pages), Amber Sparks and Robert Kloss’s The Desert Places should be mulled over slowly, deliberately, and preferably, if one is squeamish, in well-lit places, for this hybrid text of lyrical rhapsodies, interrogatives, lists, Q&As, omniscient pronouncements, lexicographic glossaries, lush vignettes, and gruesome full-color Matt Kish illustrations is an extended meditation on…