The best job I ever had was making pizza and serving ice cream at a gas station in Dickeyville, Wisconsin, population 1061. This was before BP or Mobil or whoever owned everything and it was still possible to hide in a corner of the Midwest and not be too wired into a corporate blueprint. I…

Haven’s Wake by Ladette Randolph opens quietly in the pre-dawn hours as Elsa Grebel sits down to her piano and begins playing a Mennonite hymn. She is joined by her son, Jonathan, then gradually, by the other members of her family who are staying with her. Their voices and the music rise with the morning sun…

The first thing to catch my eye was, of course, the cover—a beautifully minimalist design by Corey Frost. You may not be able to judge a book by the cover, but you can judge the publisher’s commitment to and belief in the book, and Ellipsis’ belief is obviously strong; with good reason. I then turned…

Perhaps it was the sea that had come pouring over this land, creating its waves, or maybe the land itself had come pouring out from deep in the earth’s core, but in much more recent years, this land of hills and valleys had supported another great influx, a surge of human beings from the big…

Written by Blake Butler and Vanessa Place, then separately edited and stitched together by Christopher Higgs,One is an experiment and a hybridized novel that can be extremely difficult to grasp, pushing the boundaries of what defines fiction. One is multiple stories combined into a single work that rips apart the dialectical debates of subconscious versus…

Tad Crawford’s debut novel, A Floating Life, is a scattering of narrative puzzle pieces that fit together unexpectedly. They do not complete a single storyline image, but they are very satisfying to play with and seek points of connection. An unnamed “everyman” character finds himself in a difficult job interview in an unlikely place. Unaware…

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…