Brooke Shaffner’s Country of Under tackles the social issues that shape identity and belonging. Immigration is the novel’s heartbeat, propelling its main characters, two misfit teens named Pilar and Río, into situations that ultimately help them to better understand themselves in relation to the immigration-related struggles that have shaped their lives.  The teens have everything…

Reading a book about reading books is like entering a hall of mirrors: the experience is at once fascinating and disturbing. Like other stories about books and writing, The Book Censor’s Library drags the reader into itself, claiming to be one kind of book but unexpectedly (and imperceptibly) turning into another. Even the title throws…

To call prose cinematic is often to imply that its descriptions are heavily visual, focused on surfaces more than interiorities, and rich with sweeping panoramas, vivid colors, and dramatic action. Not here. While thoroughly cinematic, the forty-four stories in Terese Svoboda’s The Long Swim are shaped by techniques of the editing room more than the…

How might a woman writer in Gilded-Age Boston break free from the authorial identity fashioned by her publisher and take control over not just her writing but her life?  Virginia Pye’s The Literary Undoing of Victoria Swann is, at its core, a novel that centralizes women’s creative labor. Born Victoria Meeks and re-christened by her…

It is worth noting the absence of a question mark in the title of Jody Hobbs Hesler’s debut collection, What Makes You Think You’re Supposed to Feel Better. These stories do not ask sarcastically or bitterly why we feel entitled to feel better. Rather, the collection explores surprising moments that do offer a possibility of…

In coastal Catalonia’s wine country, families have owned vineyards for centuries. But the land was never completely devoted to grapes. Other crops have long provided sustenance and supplemented family incomes. As the monoculture that came with the twentieth century drove down profits, farmers took second jobs to support their vineyards. The death blow to the…

Sita in Exile is a surrealist painting made not on canvas but in words. From the opening lines, “The sun was horrific. It spread itself over the fjord like an overturned pot of buttermilk,” Rashi Rohatgi creates a disorienting world inhabited by Sita, an Indian American who has recently relocated from Chicago to Norway. As…

In The Corner of East and Dreams, Joan Connor’s sixth book, readers are intrepid travelers in the author’s fictional wilderness. At least half of the collection’s thirty stories are laced with fabulism, images and developments drawn from a deep well of allusion and myth. Connor’s prose is so precise and elegant, her fabulous fictional wilderness…

Reading Aimee LaBrie’s award-winning collection, Rage and Other Cages, is like hanging out with a whip-smart best friend who can read a room and throw out a zinger while everyone else is still shrugging off their coats. Unfiltered, cringy, hilarious, LaBrie’s stories center on women who can no longer contain the stew of regret, fear…

Almost a million people fled Lebanon during the 1980s, around a quarter of the country’s population. The love of Lebanon, including a profound desire to see it restored to the sophisticated, beautiful, fertile, and pluralist country they remember, runs through the veins of every Lebanese I know. In Ghassan Zeinedine’s debut collection of tales, that…

You don’t need to be a soccer fan to appreciate the game’s intrinsic drama. Nowhere is it more evident than in the penalty kick. At times the whole game can come down to a tense face-off between a kicker and a goalie—never mind how well or poorly both teams have played in the many minutes…

At the start of Holly M. Wendt’s compassionate debut novel, Heading North, two hockey players, who are also secret lovers, train on a frozen canal in the deep night. The setting shows the score: “the ice hums, a thin crack somewhere between them, an easing settle. The canal’s meter of water is the least of…