I’ll admit, the way for an author to get me to put down a book is to tell me how to read it. I’ve even committed the sacrilege of being pissed off at Alice Notley’s The Descent of Alette,” target-“blank” with its frontispiece stating that idiot readers have been reading the book wrong and directions…

Controversial ambiguity. Two words that best describe Bruno Jasieński’s novel, I Burn Paris, recently published by Twisted Spoon Press. Although the story was originally serialized in French journal L’Humanité in 1929, Anglophone readers have had to wait for Soren A. Gauger and Marcin Piekoszewski’s 2012 translation to gain access to Jasieński’s particular blend of Polish…

David Giannini opens Rim, his multifarious prose poem, with a quotation by Spanish philosopher Jorgé Ortega y Gasset. It reads: So many things fail to interest us because they don’t find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do then is to increase the number of places in our…

Novels of work, particularly those that take on modern laboring in all its absurdity and confusion, are a favorite subgenre of mine. From Magnus Mills’s fence builders and bus drivers caught in bureaucratic nightmares to the bizarre and often brutal administrative interactions of Lydie Salvayre’s Everyday Life or Stacey Levine’s Dra—, it’s a fictional category…

As I read Shut Up/Look Pretty, the thought that kept popping up in my mind was that if Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Bret Easton Ellis made a bunch of literary babies, this would be the result. Equal parts feminine, poetic, visual, rich, frustrating, and haunting, this collection of stories from Lauren Becker, Erin Fitzgerald, Kirsty…

There is nothing at all inherently unsatisfying about a story collection in which there is no overarching theme; I say this because I’m not trying to set up a comparison—it can be great fun, as a reader, to browse through a writer’s workbasket of assorted tricks and styles. To experience a sampling of their skill…

There’s no revelation in Colin Winnette’s Revelation. That itself could be something revelatory. Or that’s a disingenuously reductive way to begin a review. The blurb to end all blurbs. The sentiment that says nothing, reveals nothing. Or maybe that’s the perfect way to begin the review of this book? Or that’s not at all the…

Avery Arlington, the heroine of Dana Johnson’s novel, Elsewhere, California is an African American woman whose parents moved from Tennessee to Los Angeles just before she was born. She is the first and only member of her family to attend university. She is an artist and she is married to a successful and wealthy lawyer…

My knowledge of the Falklands War is limited to whatever bits I’ve picked up over the years from mentions in popular culture, newspapers, and international relations courses in college. Considering I’m neither British nor Argentinian, it’s unsurprising I’ve never been required to study the conflict, though the fact I instinctually refer to “the Falklands” rather…

“There’s a sense now that to be an American fiction writer is to deal with America in the world — and the world in America. If in the past American fiction dealt with the rest of the globe by trying hard to assimilate it, today it deals with it by going outward towards it.” —…

Told in sequential first-person interview-style narrative, a colourful cast of characters reveals the tale of New Yorker Shawn Regal’s murder by horse tranquilizer four days after his marriage to the murderess, Brenda Bernstein. Brenda admits on page one—in fact, sentence one—that she killed him. The whole truth of the matter won’t reveal itself until much…

In a small scene in the very last story of Mary Costello’s most elegant collection, The China Factory, a retiring schoolteacher is being driven to the very party meant to celebrate her long career. She is a curious and wonderful fictional character in that her past includes a painful, transformative event that has shaped every…