Memory plays a significant role in the books of German writer Christa Wolf (1929 – 2011). Much of her often autobiographical work deals with queries to a younger self, or a younger country. Even her Greek novels Cassandra and Medea, in their bold re-telling of ancient stories, subtly investigate and play with the collective memories…

Commercials are affect-quicksand, emotion-riptides. They grab, they pull, and—even when you think that you are free of them—they do not leave. Commercials sit like bits of food inside the crevices of our cultural molars: they are in us, and they do not dislodge so easily. “More Ovaltine please” means something, it tells us something about…

The Other Room is not about recovery from grief. Claudia, the main character in Kim Triedman’s novel, says: From the start I understood that one does not recover from the death of a child. It is only that one continues to live. This book is about a family continuing to live despite the upheaval of…

The title of Derek Palacio’s novella suggests a desire to rid oneself of a potential foe, and considering how much the novella concerns itself with boxing and the bond between an untested fighter and his trainer, How to Shake the Other Man seems an apt title for Palacio’s debut. However, the story of a young…

Jeff Jackson’s debut novel Mira Corpora is a study in defiant contradictions. As its jacket description states, it’s a coming-of-age story for people who hate coming-of-age stories. In addition, it’s a book that clearly states an autobiographical bent while incorporating fantastical, creepy elements, but without making the reader stop to wonder what is real and…

In Kelcey Parker’s Liliane’s Balcony, A Novella of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, built for Liliane and Edgar Kauffman, is more than mere setting—it is a haunted, live place. In the prologue, which recreates Liliane’s state of mind at the end of her life, she is tormented by thoughts of her husband’s latest lover, who…

In his latest collection of stories, Spatz often looks to precious stones and minerals—a suitable preoccupation for a writer whose work combines a sense of deep mining and exquisite detail. A dead infant is “blue as a gem” in “Any Landlord’s Dream.” In “Happy For You,” a woman is a “silver-town bordello queen.” In “Luck,”…

In The Greenhouse by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (translated by Brian FitzGibbon), a young Icelandic man loses his mother, uproots a bundle of rose plants from her greenhouse and travels to a far away monastery in another country, the site of a once-famous rose garden now fallen into almost complete disarray. At the monastery, Lobbi’s goal…

“Give me some of your cocaine or some of your heroin,” I said. “I don’t care which.” There are times in life we find ourselves adrift. We stumble along, distanced from love, unclaimed by family or career or geography. We are left alone with ourselves, and lacking vision and a compass of beliefs, we grope…

I’ve read many novels in which the narrator reveals him- (or her-) self to be entirely unreliable. In the right hands, this fairly common literary device creates a scenario in which readers can play detective and attempt to spot the inconsistencies in the story as it is being told. A well-executed unreliable narrator allows for…

A resident oddness subsists in Laura Del-Rivo’s short story collection, Where is My Mask of an Honest Man? Linked by the backdrop of past and present Notting Hill, her clutch of characters are often amusing, defined by quirks and pops of evocative description. An eclectic crew ranging from a drug addict to a phantom mathematician,…

Michael James Rizza’s Cartilage and Skin is a novel about connection and the body. The connections may be real or imaginary, physical or emotional, mental or moral. External, like skin, or internal, like cartilage. The bodies in this narrative are desiring and imperfect. Fragile. They have the power to be hurt, and they have the…