I’ve always wanted to read a book that inhabits the place where I no longer live and would never live again, that region of Western New York I will always call home. So of course I wanted to read Bill Peters’s Maverick Jetpants in the City of Quality which is set in Rochester, near where…

Brian Sousa’s Almost Gone, a novel in stories, spans four generations of a Portuguese immigrant family in America, all in search of better lives. These non-linear, circuitous stories are told from multiple perspectives and show characters repeatedly screwing up, in ways small, large, and even terrible. This is a collection of lives gone wrong, sometimes…

“How did you sleep?” It’s a simple question, one often asked without much consideration and answered just as casually. But think about it for a moment. How did you sleep last night? Did you sleep deeply? Did you sleep poorly? Did you sleep in a bed, on a couch, sitting upright during a long flight?…

How many times will I apply for a job over the course of a lifetime? It pays the bills—something to remember while waiting in line, while waiting anxiously for the job interview to begin. Better believe you’re surprised you’ve gotten this far. They call you in for an interview. It means your application made more…

My grandfather was born in Leap, County Cork, in a house where the sea lapped the end of the garden. When bodies washed up from the torpedoed Lusitania in 1915, it was his mother, Ellen O’Donovan, also the area Registrar of Births, Deaths and Marriages, who escorted them by horse-and-carriage the forty-six miles to Cork…

Midway through The Way Of The Dog, narrator Harold Nivenson — would-be artist, once art collector and critic, now curmudgeonly hermit and near-invalid — discovers a koan hung by another’s hand on his refrigerator: Chao Chou was asked, “When a man comes to you with nothing, what would you say to him?” And he replied, “Throw it…

On page two of Hiromi Kawakami’s The Briefcase, when narrator Tsukiko is explaining how her story begins and how she became re-acquainted with her former teacher, a man who will only be “Sensei” in our story, she also very subtly establishes a parallel between what is about to happen and the first lines of Sei…

“I grew up in a country whose language is spoken by fewer than nine million people. Most of the literature that shaped me as a reader and an individual, and later as a writer, was in translation, mostly English works in Bulgarian. This translation of 18% Gray from Bulgarian to English is, in a way,…

The Mere Weight of Words is a heavy examination of difficult relationships. The first person narrator is a young woman named Meredith whose passion is language, something she uses as both a shield and as a sword. Her estranged father is in the film industry, something she seems to roll her eyes at throughout the…

All of life is a complex interplay between the contemplative and the corporeal. Our experience of our bodies—how they make us feel, whether they define us, the extent to which we seek to control our own and those of others—forms the backbone of In the Body, a provocative new collection of short stories and a…

This volume of 200 or so pages is a delight from beginning to end. Beginning with an author’s note and ending with the title story—a climax of all that a non-initiate thinks of as Japanese exoticism. Of the 13 stories, 12 have already been published in a wide variety of journals—“often in very different versions”…

There’s a reason childhood and adolescence are often referred to as formative years. Kids are impressionable. Their brains are like underground caverns waiting to be made into landfills for knowledge. They absorb and learn from everything around them, for better or for worse. That capacity for learning is perhaps matched only by vulnerability, a dangerous…