Catherine Gammon’s labyrinthine second novel Sorrow is expansive in its layers of perception, but also specific in its meanings. The word itself, sorrow, sounds like a slow process, something quiet and arching, but it implies a long-held sadness, and within that an arc of emotional action. The book delivers on this idea, pulling the reader through the grief of…

Ethel Rohan’s story collection, Goodnight Nobody, is a compelling set of stories from an Irish writer who captures the essence of ordinary moments and infuses them with a quiet sense of importance. The characters who populate the thirty stories in the collection span both of Rohan’s worlds; the Ireland of her early life, and the…

Human beings are a collection of imperfections and drives, and it is our struggle against our baser desires that colors our lives. In Alissa Nutting’s TAMPA, readers are introduced to Celeste Price, a character so singularly defined by her sexual need, so embracing of it, that it informs how she perceives every aspect of life,…

Hanna Krall’s Chasing the King of Hearts (translated by Philip Boehm) is a story of the Holocaust. But more than this, it is a story of individual imperative and an exploration of personal belief-making. The book opens with the early events of a typical love story—young people meeting at a friend’s house, a girl who…

Adrian Van Young’s debut story collection, The Man Who Noticed Everything, is as rich and dark as the soil that beguiles his characters. “The earth has witching in her ways,” the narrator says in “Hard Water.” “I have never pretended to know her completely.” These stories are steeped in the language of haunting and uncertainty,…

I am guilty of taking history for granted. When I drive, I offer no thought to the workings of the internal combustion engine. I don’t consider Ford’s assembly line or the social impact of the Model T. I don’t contemplate the intricate evolution that has deposited me in a vehicle that is absolutely space age…

Matt Bell’s much anticipated debut novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, could be briefly described as one man’s quest to redeem his marriage in the aftermath of questionable living, poor decision-making, and a series of events that ultimately alienate his wife. However, a plot synopsis of this kind…

Beacons is a refreshingly earnest anthology of short fiction commissioned for the dual purposes of raising funds for the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition and telling the stories that may motivate human civilization to act on behalf of our planet. No short order, and certainly one that begs the question: what can stories do to combat…

In 2011, 450 novellas from 34 different countries were entered for the first Paris Literary Prize created by the legendary Shakespeare & Company bookshop and the de Groot Foundation. Grey Cats, set in Paris where its author lives, was one of two runners-up. I must confess to bias at the outset: Paris is a city…

The fourth line of “The Water Cycle,” the ninth story in Anne Valente’s slender collection, An Elegy for Mathematics, reads: But sometimes it made me feel strange, for reasons I can’t explain, to think that maybe you knew we had separate lives in some way, and that sometimes we did things that weren’t always the…

Steven Schwartz’s latest story collection is an aptly titled one. The souls occupying the pages of the eleven stories in Little Raw Souls feel a little uncooked, a little incomplete—but by no means should this be taken as a disparaging comment. The rawness implied in the title not only germinates in the imperfections of the…

NB – Full disclosure: I have a short piece in “The Wife” issue of Spolia that was published last week. However, that piece was commissioned and published after I read these first two issues and after this review was written. This past spring Bookslut launched its sister publication, Spolia, a literary journal publishing monthly themed…