A pair of twins and their friends ogle beach parties from the safety of a balcony while watching the twins’ mother dance away the nights; the girls envy the mother’s freedom, yet they do not understand the danger she courts each night. A young woman tries her hand at social networking, but fears the man…

In Joaquín Pérez Azaústre’s The Swimmers, a separation from his wife and stalling career send protagonist Jonás Ager into a kind of tense disconnect from his world and so he takes solace in swimming; this is not a Zen process or other spiritual journey but a connection between body and mind that he cannot find out of…

Kyle Minor’s Praying Drunk has been building steam for months, ever since its publication announcement in 2013. Minor’s previous collection, In the Devil’s Territory, (2008) was, like this new one, challenging, but not in the sense of experimental or perplexing: his work includes a variety of times, shifts, and psychologies. Praying Drunk moves from the…

Stevan Allred’s stunner of a debut novel is a complex portrait of small-town life. Narrators vary in these fifteen interconnected stories, and this is part of the beauty of this book. The tone is set by the composite voices, which, despite variations in social class, remains consistent. For instance, we encounter Volpe, the man with…

I warn you, I’m a sensitive man, at the mercy of whims and fancy. John Henry Fleming’s first short story collection is a colorful gathering of misfits and metaphysical battles. In Fleming’s opening story “The Cloud Reader,” the title character is a clairvoyant outcast struggling against a fearful, conservative society. The cloud reader, in the…

A failed soccer wunderkind, an anguished mother, and a love-thwarted bar owner are the central figures of the three longish narratives that make up Elisa Ruotolo’s splendid collection, I Stole the Rain. Lengthy though the stories might be, it matters little, as by the end of the book one feels as if a lifetime in stories has…

Set in Cuba in 2003 on the eve of the revolution, Elizabeth Huergo’s The Death of Fidel Pérez depicts the interconnectivity of history and its subjects in a deeply moving first novel. The novel begins with a heartbroken and drunken young man, Fidel Pérez, as he pines for his already spoken-for love, Isabel. He stumbles onto his…

Canicule, the newest novel from writer and critic Louis Armand, opens with a scene of self-immolation. The suicide is a man named Ascher, friend to the novel’s central character and sometimes narrator, a failing screenwriter named Hess. The novel tells two stories: the story of Hess and Ascher and their third friend, Wolf, as children,…

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…