William Luvaas’s Three Devils is a collection of five stories set against the backdrop of a Southern California landscape ravaged by climate disaster, where every shared resource has been exhausted or destroyed. As human as it is haunting, the collection offers a vision of a future that many readers may feel is already upon us.…

Toward the end of Blowfish, the unnamed thirty-something female protagonist hears a harsh truth from a friend. “You should know something,” the friend says. “­You’re always thinking about yourself.” She’s right: The sculptor has spent the entirety of the novel planning, attempting, or moving on from trying to die. But apart from this preoccupation, nothing…

Miriam Gershow’s latest novel, Closer, begins with the death of a high school student named Livvy in the college town of Horace, Oregon. Woody, the school’s guidance counselor, delivers news of this tragedy to Lark, another student. “I wanted you to hear it from me,” he tells her.  ‘Livvy,’ he said, and Woody would misremember…

Early in Joanna Howard’s novel Porthole, famed art-house director Helena Désir recounts her childhood living with her uncle, Yiorgos, a painter, on a boat moored in Sausalito, California. The existence she describes is both transient and strangely static, their lives punctuated by the comings and goings of her uncle’s various lovers and benefactors, Yiorgos carefully…

Ubiquitous, mostly innocuous, occasionally destabilizing, memory pervades our daily life. But for all its commonplace appearance in idiom and ritual, it’s a hard thing to understand; to, say, get one’s head around. This confusion is all the more heightened for the novelist, who will almost always rely on memory, in some form or another. But…

The past endures. A major theme of the work of the late Australian poet, novelist, and diarist Antigone Kefala, the past’s inescapability is at the fore of her early novel The Island, published in 1984 and recently reissued by Transit Books. This edition, with an introduction by the novelist Madeline Watts, provides a long-overdue introduction…

In Jessica Lévai’s novella, The Glass Garden, scavengers travel to another planet hoping to excavate a work of art, only to discover that it’s an illusion. The titular glass garden is a bioluminescent image mysteriously projected onto a cave floor. Despite its strangeness, the scavengers try to remove the garden, hoping to sell it. Altogether…

Our editors share some suggestions for the season ahead.

In 1936, the American writer Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) traveled to Jamaica on a Guggenheim fellowship to study folk traditions there and in Haiti. On the way, she lost her camera. The detail hangs like a tantalizing thread from her account of her experiences, Tell My Horse (1937). With The Jamaica Kollection, Marcia Douglas has…

The stories in The Sea Gives Up the Dead, Molly Olguín’s debut collection, are remarkable for the ways in which they skate between the weird and the mundane, the ordinary and the out-of-the-question, never wholly letting on whether the wild events they portray are truly extraordinary or are, rather, everyday events that have been generously…

A sobering, disquieting reality is that identity isn’t entirely intrinsic: We are shaped by our circumstances. Within that disquiet, the idea persists that there is a core—something immutable—to every person. Nevertheless, people can be shaped, altered, mutated, changed. That identity can be imposed by others with more power and privilege, is frightening.  This possibility, explored…

At the center of Scar, originally published in Spanish as Cicatriz (2015), is Sonia, a young woman who is bored by her job and burdened by life at home with her overwhelmed mother, younger siblings, and grandmother with worsening dementia. As someone who has “always liked wearing masks,” Sonia finds escape online, frequenting chat rooms…