At a compact 216 pages, A Shelter of Others concerns the release of Mason Laws from prison, and split into three sections, the novel focuses not only on the trials of Mason’s freedom but on how his reemergence affects the lives of his estranged wife, Lavada, and aging father, Sam. Early on, the novel tends…

We all intermittently lose our internal compass, whether it’s from the physical disorientation of a new environment, or the psychological confusion concurrent with hunting for glories long passed. In these situations, logic clashes with ego, producing a mindset unable to see the proverbial forest from the trees, trapping an individual without the need of a…

The Siege of Sarajevo forms the backdrop for this collection of six stories by Alma Lazarevska. Written during the events described in the book and published in 1996, there is no danger of this first English translation feeling out of date. We need no geographical or historical details to grasp the timeless quality of these…

Ravi Mangla’s Understudies is brief (141 pages), the cover an unassuming cobalt blue with a black teardrop in the middle (a peephole, perhaps?). Two central characters, including the anti-hero narrator, don’t have names. The book is told in a series of numbered vignettes, each one about the length of a short flash-fiction. The structure creates…

Marinko Koščec’s A Handful of Sand is the autopsy of a passionate love affair. An artist and a publisher from Zagreb recount the stories of their lives leading up to the day they first met, weaving present and past, fantasy and self-analysis into a humane and utterly convincing novel. At the same time it is…

When joining a new community, we inherit its history and try to insert ourselves into an established web of relationships. We find ourselves interacting with people who might otherwise remain strangers, and we take great care to cope with their territorial instincts and demands, the accusations that we’re killing their grass or parking our cars…

Sad Robot Stories by Mason Johnson is a novella about the act and power of storytelling. It follows Robot, a machine who doesn’t fit in with his fellows in a post-apocalyptic world where humans and animals are extinct. He’s so different from the other robots that they fail to understand his difference. He’s sensitive, empathetic,…

The second printing of Megan Boyle’s defiantly unclassifiable 2011 volume, selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee, by avant-garde publisher muumuu house, affords an opportunity to reexamine one of the most innovative—and largely overlooked—literary creations of the past decade. The work’s initial appearance was largely ignored by the mainstream critical establishment; arguably…

Peter Stjernström’s latest novel The Best Book in the World is something of a chimera: as well as the story of what might happen when two authors compete to write the best book in the world, it’s also a satire of the publishing world and an exercise in metafiction. The plot is relatively straightforward. One…

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…