The Many Revenges of Kip Flynn by Sean Dixon is a marvelous, contemporary novel that subtly takes hold and improves as it ages, so that by the end, a fully realized tale has played out, encompassing the spectrums of dark and light, gentrification and urban blight, vengeance and forgiveness, upheaval and reconstruction, fire and water…

The stories in xTx’s collection Normally Special, published this year by the newly established Tiny Hardcore Press, can be divided into two categories, mostly on length, although that simple difference in word count also marks a diversity of voice and story complexity. This is not to say that the shorter stories in Normally Special are…

Cowboy Maloney’s Electric City begins with an epigraph from The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed: More than iron, more than lead, more than gold I need electricity. I need it more than I need lamb or pork or lettuce or cucumber. I need it for my dreams. These are the unedited words “written” by Racter,…

An animal in the road that’s been run-over or someone passed out on the sidewalk in broad daylight—there are things that most people can’t help but stare at as they pass. And then there are the less blatant temptations: the curtain half pulled back on the bedroom window of that one house on the block;…

Is it wrong to deny a woman her entrée into adult sexuality? Is it abuse to have sex with a willing partner who is 17 years old? What about 16? What about 14? Cris Mazza never lets the reader off the hook in this entertaining but deeply unsettling novel about women’s changing sexual lives and…

It isn’t every day one comes across a novel of guerilla warfare, anti-globalization style, set in a picturesque Italian village, a novel that also involves a detailed family saga and a complicated love story. Filippo Bologna’s How I Lost the War, translated from Italian by Howard Curtis and published this year by Pushkin Press, is…

Fabric is a difficult book to write about. This is not because it is a difficult book. So this is how we will begin: There are five sections in Fabric. The form of the book exists in the nospace between prose and sometimes poetry. There is a list of characters: Alfred, Dorothy Gale, Jackie Robinson,…

Literary journals are like photographs—snapshots of a particular moment and a specific literary scene. By chronicling the work of a great number of writers in each issue and with every new edition, journals catalog trends and narrative voices as well as the development of new themes and innovative perspectives. They demonstrate how language, either by…

A collection by its very nature requires cohesion, a controlling idea, or at least a consistent style of writing, to link unique pieces. Any departures from that theme—no matter how tolerant it may intend to be—must be purposeful departures, each a worthy variation. The trouble with Robert Levin’s collection When Pacino’s Hot, I’m Hot is…

A book is a kind of country, a landscape conceived and constructed by an author out of words and images and ideas. Usually, but not always, there are people moving about this created landscape, inhabiting their country, and the book is, in that sense, a framework for their story. Whatever it is. Whatever shape it…

Reading Abbott Awaits, Chris Bachelder’s third novel, felt eerily familiar at times, like reading the inside of my head. The book follows its titular character—first or last name, we don’t know—one single-day chapter at a time through his summer break from teaching at a state university, during which he watches his two year-old daughter, awaits…

In disarmingly straightforward prose, translated from the German by Michael Hofman, Peter Stamm’s Seven Years is an unpretentious meditation on the subtle tenacity of unhappiness. Stamm isn’t interested in catastrophic events, but rather, the little hurts and betrayals, inescapable weaknesses and patchy mendings. He presents this collection of minor failures through a story of the…