In The Poison that Purifies You, Elizabeth Kadetsky offers ten variations on the theme of vulnerability. Since social life provides many opportunities to play on the vulnerabilities of others, the stories in this accomplished collection are densely populated, like the cities in which most of them take place, and touched with a certain skepticism about…

What I’m trying to say is, it’s sad the world is ending, isn’t it? I mean, all the suffering that’s about to happen. All the people—everything they’ve ever done and hope to do will be gone forever. Families are going to be separated—some will go to heaven and some won’t. Plus the sun and the…

“The words I wanted to say were not a prayer,” says 23 year-old Taylor Alta, moments after reciting the Lord’s Prayer in reverence for the striking New England and Mid-Atlantic landscapes that frame Kate Gray’s just-released novel, Carry the Sky, “The words I wanted were about wanting, the opening in the chest, the loneliness.” Gray’s…

Is this the motley underbelly of Ireland? The fated and the maimed? The directionless? Colin Barrett certainly seems to be constructing such a vision of contemporary small-town Ireland in his award-winning Young Skins. I could approach this collection from several directions, but I’ve decided to have a look at it through the character of Arm,…

I had a doll when I was a little boy—apparently. I don’t remember Cindy, but my mother never tires of reminding me how progressive she was in letting me have her: Cindy. The doll. Progressive? Sara Lippmann’s Doll Palace takes a more sardonic view of The Doll as toy, as child substitute, as moniker and as metaphor…

The stories in Long Hidden summon the fabulist landscape of remote lands and rare creatures of myth, give or take a zombie and a couple of werewolves. For all its rollicking and twisting plots, most of the stories are embedded in critique: confronting and overturning the notion that magical agency belongs only to those who…

The stories in Leesa Cross-Smith’s debut collection, Every Kiss a War —full of adoration and loss and infidelity and sex and mistakes and memory and regret—prove that, sometimes, an author can unearth the perfect title to represent her work as a whole, for within this assemblage, Cross-Smith crafts twenty-seven glimpses into the lives of those…

The first bit of front matter a reader encounters opening Twisted Spoon Press’ new English translation of Bogdan Suceavă’s Miruna, A Tale is not a title page, or a copyright page, or a list of the author’s titles to date. It is a black page ornamented at its center with an intricate series of concentric…

“Family will always kill you – some bit by bit, others all at once. It is the love that does it.” “History could do that, change a person’s name. History was something so simple and insistent that none of us has escaped it.” Tiphanie Yanique’s novel Land of Love and Drowning intertwines these two themes—the…

Jean Ferry (1906-1974) was a French screenwriter who worked with Cluozot and Bunuel, a minor figure in the surrealist movement and also an essayist known for his criticism on Raymond Roussel. His only book of published fiction, The Conductor and Other Tales, which appeared in 1953, was only translated in-full as of last autumn. The…

In the summer of 2011, science writer Meera Lee Sethi, who was then based in Chicago, spent nine weeks as a volunteer field assistant at Ånnsjöns Fågelstation, a bird observatory located in the mountains of Jämtland in Sweden. In the collection of seventeen short natural history essays that came out of that experience, Mountainfit, Sethi…

The growing popularity of Clarice Lispector—thanks in no small part to the efforts of translator-biographer Benjamin Moser—has opened a larger space for translated fiction by women such as Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares. Lispector, Tavares, and their translators continue the fight for gender equity in publishing by exploding many of the facile dichotomies that publishers and marketers…