In My Beauty, when Danuta catches the attention of millionaire Sven and escapes her troubles as a farm worker, she discovers dueling layers to her new upper-class lifestyle. On the surface, everything is beautiful, rich, clean. Viewed from the warm, comfortable farmhouse, snow “swathe[s] the farm in luxurious folds.” To her former co-workers snow means…

Contemporary audiences, inoculated against splattering brains and shattering lives, know when to peep between their fingers, when to look away. How, then, is a writer to convey horror to an audience inured to horror? What tools can the writer use to shock us out of our complacency? Daphne Gottlieb chooses form. This chapbook consists of…

As a boy Dave Lordan would almost certainly have watched Jim Henson’s Fraggle Rock (1983-87) on Irish national television. Like most children’s verse, the show’s theme song has a serious message at its heart. It has to do with the nature of work and responsibility, and it is tempting to suggest that it lodged somewhere…

In her introduction to Red Room: New Short Stories Inspired by the Brontës, editor A.J. Ashworth tells us that the anthology came about as a rescue attempt, a way to help save the original Brontë home (in a village called Thornton in West Yorkshire) with the hope of giving it some sort of historical protection.…

Elizabeth Cohen’s short story collection, The Hypothetical Girl, is directly inspired from her experiences in post-divorce dating. The title comes from one story in the collection in which a young woman is told by someone she meets online that she is not a real girl, but a hypothetical girl. In an interview with Burnt Twig…

Catherine Gammon’s labyrinthine second novel Sorrow is expansive in its layers of perception, but also specific in its meanings. The word itself, sorrow, sounds like a slow process, something quiet and arching, but it implies a long-held sadness, and within that an arc of emotional action. The book delivers on this idea, pulling the reader through the grief of…

Ethel Rohan’s story collection, Goodnight Nobody, is a compelling set of stories from an Irish writer who captures the essence of ordinary moments and infuses them with a quiet sense of importance. The characters who populate the thirty stories in the collection span both of Rohan’s worlds; the Ireland of her early life, and the…

Human beings are a collection of imperfections and drives, and it is our struggle against our baser desires that colors our lives. In Alissa Nutting’s TAMPA, readers are introduced to Celeste Price, a character so singularly defined by her sexual need, so embracing of it, that it informs how she perceives every aspect of life,…

Hanna Krall’s Chasing the King of Hearts (translated by Philip Boehm) is a story of the Holocaust. But more than this, it is a story of individual imperative and an exploration of personal belief-making. The book opens with the early events of a typical love story—young people meeting at a friend’s house, a girl who…

Adrian Van Young’s debut story collection, The Man Who Noticed Everything, is as rich and dark as the soil that beguiles his characters. “The earth has witching in her ways,” the narrator says in “Hard Water.” “I have never pretended to know her completely.” These stories are steeped in the language of haunting and uncertainty,…

I am guilty of taking history for granted. When I drive, I offer no thought to the workings of the internal combustion engine. I don’t consider Ford’s assembly line or the social impact of the Model T. I don’t contemplate the intricate evolution that has deposited me in a vehicle that is absolutely space age…

Matt Bell’s much anticipated debut novel, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, could be briefly described as one man’s quest to redeem his marriage in the aftermath of questionable living, poor decision-making, and a series of events that ultimately alienate his wife. However, a plot synopsis of this kind…