Nick Sweeney’s novel Laikonik Express is named after a long-distance train that runs between Krakow and Gdynia in Poland but we do not meet this “central character” until the narrator, Nolan Kennedy, has already travelled from Istanbul, where he lives, to Warsaw. Kennedy has found an abandoned typescript by his friend Don Darius when the…

The line between childhood and adulthood is rarely as sharp and defined as we expect. As children we believed being an adult entailed more than having spent a certain number of years on the Earth; there must be something, some intangible magic that turns each child into someone different: the adult version of him or…

So I was reading Jessica Westhead’s short story “Coconut,” from her collection And Also Sharks, and I sort of lost myself and laughed out loud and laughed out loud until the guy next to me asked me what I was reading. So I explained, “Well, there’s this woman who starts shoplifting, stealing all these things.…

Douglas Myles worked in a library before becoming a professional mimic. And if Myles had been a real person instead of a made-up character, he would have been tempted to shelve The Mimic’s Own Voice by Tom Williams in the PN2285’s (the comedic studies section), instead of the PS3623’s (American contemporary fiction), because the novella…

The title of Thomas P. Balázs’s nine-story collection, Omicron Ceti III, invites the reader to think about the book in terms of an original Star Trek episode entitled “This Side of Paradise.” Like most of those original Star Trek stories, “This Side of Paradise” is a classic query-story with a moral, asking viewers to think…

This engaging trio of stories by Brown undergrad/Iowa MFA writer Madeline McDonnell are deceptively rewarding. Although they are not three parts of a greater whole, they are related in their themes, by certain metaphors and constraints, and by their accomplished style. Shot through with humor, each seemingly simple story proves, by contrast, its true depth. Madeline McDonnell…

Peirene Press, a small London-based publisher, launched its contemporary European novella program in 2010 with a selection of three books grouped into what they called the Series of the Female Voice, featuring works from France, Catalonia and Germany. It then followed up in 2011 with the Series of the Man, composed of three novellas translated…

John Givens’s A Friend in the Police opens in a cramped and sweltering customs hut in an unnamed Southeast Asian country where sixty-something George Bates has traveled to find word of his son, Philip. This fairly easy story, of an American gone to find his wayward or misguided son in an exotic and unfamiliar land,…

The Book of Happenstance is a novel uninterested in epiphany: murders are left unsolved, relationships, their wounds and their possibilities, remain in that condition, and precious things stolen by thieves are never recovered. Helena Verbloem, the narrator, is a lexicographer assisting a renowned scholar, Theo Verway, on a project to catalog, to rescue, obsolete Afrikaans…

A sudden, brutal and unforgettable immersion, Ayiti explores the intimacies of Haitian life in both Haiti and the United States through short stories, several as concise as a single page. The Artistically Declined Press website aptly describes Ayiti as “a unique blend of fiction, nonfiction and poetry,” apt because it is often difficult to discern…

Love, inarguably one of the most universal human experiences, has come to be an almost taboo theme in serious literature. Love stories are too often sentimental and trite, populated with one-dimensional characters and all too familiar plots. As a result, love stories are often delegated to that most disparaged of genres: romance. Yet as a…

It isn’t easy to publish a love story these days—somehow we’ve all decided this is the stuff of cliché. As if the back and forth success and failure of looking for love doesn’t concern most people most of the time. Which is why Nina-Marie Gardner’s Sherry & Narcotics stands out in its genre of contemporary…