In The Greenhouse by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir (translated by Brian FitzGibbon), a young Icelandic man loses his mother, uproots a bundle of rose plants from her greenhouse and travels to a far away monastery in another country, the site of a once-famous rose garden now fallen into almost complete disarray. At the monastery, Lobbi’s goal…

“Give me some of your cocaine or some of your heroin,” I said. “I don’t care which.” There are times in life we find ourselves adrift. We stumble along, distanced from love, unclaimed by family or career or geography. We are left alone with ourselves, and lacking vision and a compass of beliefs, we grope…

I’ve read many novels in which the narrator reveals him- (or her-) self to be entirely unreliable. In the right hands, this fairly common literary device creates a scenario in which readers can play detective and attempt to spot the inconsistencies in the story as it is being told. A well-executed unreliable narrator allows for…

A resident oddness subsists in Laura Del-Rivo’s short story collection, Where is My Mask of an Honest Man? Linked by the backdrop of past and present Notting Hill, her clutch of characters are often amusing, defined by quirks and pops of evocative description. An eclectic crew ranging from a drug addict to a phantom mathematician,…

Michael James Rizza’s Cartilage and Skin is a novel about connection and the body. The connections may be real or imaginary, physical or emotional, mental or moral. External, like skin, or internal, like cartilage. The bodies in this narrative are desiring and imperfect. Fragile. They have the power to be hurt, and they have the…

The concept of cross gender narration isn’t exactly innovative these days, yet when a writer manages to capture something unique in the portrayal of the inner workings of the opposite sex, it’s cause enough to pay attention. Jodi Angel’s latest collection of stories, You Only Get Letters from Jail, is just the sort of work…

Valerie Trueblood’s Search Party is layered and wise. A thoughtful blend of vignettes and stories, these characters are marked by their separateness. They search for what might help them understand. Rescue arrives in unexpected ways. Our lives, these stories suggest, are directed by nothing more than chance and circumstance. We might stumble into a new family, as…

Janice Deal’s newest collection, The Decline of Pigeons, is formulaic—but not in the sense that is so often tossed around when referring to work best left to those who want something to read casually without much thought after finishing. It’s formulaic in that each of her nine stories introduce you to a life that has…

Remember that couple at your high school or college who were always making out in public, who became notorious, perhaps envied, then eventually reviled, for “doing it” a lot more than anyone else? But were they? Or was the truth a lot more complicated than it appeared on the surface? Pamela Erens’s novel The Virgins…

Near the end of The Taste of Marmalade, the main character Katrin says this: ‘You can’t do anything, yet,’ she repeats, nodding, and hears how quickly she has forgotten to live in the first person. ‘You will tell me when you can,’ she adds, but she is really saying, I was wrong. She has been…

Robert Vaughan’s Microtones is a gorgeous chapbook full of lovely little pages, poetry, and flash fiction—flashes of brilliance delivered with full poetic license. Those familiar with Vaughan’s work will know he doesn’t shy away from the heart of a matter. Take the poem “Turbidity,” for instance. It begins simply (and shallowly) enough: Holidays are hard:I’m…

Drowning is horrific. Water fills the lungs, blood flow is cut off as oxygen stops going to the brain, and desperation consumes the victim. The last seconds of his or her life are a hopeless grasp for air. In Justin Lawrence Daugherty’s collection Whatever Don’t Drown Will Always Rise, drowning becomes a parable for the…