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…

Unlike many writers who write the same story over and over, Grandbois’ first two books have been radically different. His third book, Nahoonkara, follows the pattern. It’s a pensive cacophony of personalities and perception. It’s part western and part magical realism—think Gabriel Garcia L’Amour—and part Native American Spirit Journey framed by the ramblings of a…

Valerie Trueblood’s book of short stories, Marry or Burn, makes substantial demands on its readers’ attention, for which they are repaid manifold. Unlike the seven non-consecutive chapters of Trueblood’s Seven Loves (Little, Brown and Co., 2006), these twelve stories, as a whole or even separately, do not concern a central character and his or her…

The “linked stories” in Gregory Sherl’s collection, I Have Touched You, actually lie somewhere between confessional thought fragment and prose poetry, but they come together to create a mosaic of Sherl’s vision of contemporary intimacy in shades of gray. Gray because the voice of Sherl’s narrator comes to the reader from within his own private…

In the unusual novel, The Sum of His Syndromes, K.B. Dixon’s central character David installs himself (presumably with pen and paper) in his company’s sixth-floor men’s room and then treats the reader to his scatterings: philosophic aphorisms, overheard conversations, observations about co-workers, comments about the frustrations of his self-published writer friend Peter, and repeated mentions…

Today is Monday. Tomorrow will be Tuesday. Then comes Wednesday and so on and so forth. Time ticks on and we are forced to experience each new day, feel ourselves transformed by the passing of time. We may be able to stand still or take steps backward, but we cannot avoid being swept up in…

On the cover, a handful of pills piled into the crevice made by the cupping of two gloved hands. Inside, a novel of individuals and families, of their different medications, both prescribed and over-the-counter, and the myriad problems these “typical” Americans use as crutches. The novel is also an attempt to capture and reveal the…

A dying man on his bed, feverish, sick with liver pain, exhausted from years of illness and poverty. He knows he hasn’t much time and yet he does not rest, he does not lie back and simply think over his life. He is still alive, and life equals work. He cannot stop working. Paper to…