(Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2019) Molly Reid’s The Rapture Index: A Suburban Bestiary is a stunning debut of interlacing short stories that, together, offer a warning about a human society that sees itself as disconnected from the natural world. The … Continued
(Wilkes-Barre, PA: Etruscan Press, 2019) In this kaleidoscopic pastiche of a novel, Lynn Lurie creates a world full of grief, confusion, pain, and difficult but enduring love. The unnamed narrator is the mother of a boy who struggles with many … Continued
(New Jersey: Serving House Books 2016) Paris, Etc. is an exquisite and elegant collection of poems, stories, and essays has the city of lights as its muse – and for most of the authors, it is a muse they romanticize as … Continued
(New York, NY: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2017) This debut novel from Sarah Schmidt takes as its subject the infamous Borden murders, still theorized and discussed more than a hundred years later, perhaps best known by the nefarious children’s rhyme assuming … Continued
(Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss. New York, NY: Catapult, 2017) “Who can speak for her, for what she feels? One can only guess,” Martha Cooley meditates on a statue of Madonna in Guesswork: A Reckoning with Loss, her memoir in … Continued
Translated from the Polish by Stephanie Kraft (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2016) “Only a man who is suffocating knows what an open window is,” Istvan Terey, a Hungarian poet serving as a diplomat in India, tells his Australian lover Margit … Continued
(Portland, OR: Tin House Books, 2016) In Rosalie Knecht’s debut novel, seeking relief can be just as dangerous as the problem you’re trying to escape. Set in Lomath, a small Pennsylvania town whose natural geography the author lushly chronicles, this … Continued
(Winston-Salem, NC: Press 53, 2015) The stories in Twelve Women in a Country Called America are as outstanding for their collective wisdom and distinctive voices as for their precise sentences. Cherry is a master of the short story form, but it … Continued
(Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2015) Harnessing the power of observation in service of revelation is slow, painstaking work, but its results appear effortless in the best nonfiction. Maggie Messitt achieves this in her elegant first book, The … Continued
Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman (High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire: And Other Stories, 2015) How do we survive in a world so hollowed out that it occasionally devours its own? Makina, the protagonist of Yuri Herrera’s borderlands novel, Signs Preceding the End … Continued