Fiction Archive
Unfurled by Michelle Bailat-Jones
In Unfurled, the reader is pulled forward in short, well-crafted chapters that simulate the rough-and-tumble journey through shock, grief, and the revelation of knowledge that the narrator initially rejects—that her mother survived and was in touch with her father.
The Lake on Fire, by Rosellen Brown
In response to her novel, The Lake on Fire, Rosellen Brown has been compared to both Jane Austen and Tillie Olsen.
The Taiga Syndrome by Cristina Rivera Garza
Garza's use of language and suspense is so skillful that she can remind us of the artifice of fiction in one moment, holding us up so we can see everything in its place, and in the next push our heads back beneath the surface of its conceit.
After the Winter by Guadalupe Nettel, translated by Rosalind Harvey
Guadalupe Nettel's writing, in an excellent translation by Rosalind Harvey, is spare, occasionally eerie and always elegant.
Other People’s Love Affairs by D. Wystan Owen
D. Wystan Owen’s beautiful debut collection is a book to treasure. The ten quiet stories are linked by place, but they are also linked by Owen’s great fascination with understanding the weight of the past on the present.
The Third Hotel by Laura van den Berg
Buoyed by van den Berg's sinuous, marvelous sentences, the novel is a deep dive into memory, love, and loss as filtered through film theory, metaphysics, and the humid, sunstroked cityscape of Havana.
The Incendiaries by R. O. Kwon
The book generates considerable momentum through its short chapters and often gorgeous language, and through the always present search for understanding. It is a difficult book to put down, one whose images and ideas remain long after the read.
The Secret Habit of Sorrow by Victoria Patterson
Each story is short yet encompassing, and while the plots don't connect, the collection coheres thematically. Nearly all of the protagonists and those characters eddying around them feel this secret habit of sorrow.
From a Low and Quiet Sea by Donal Ryan
Ryan’s fourth novel clocks in at just under two hundred pages, and for most writers, telling the story of multiple characters in such a small space would be a challenge. But this book contains worlds. The reader is always searching for those connections, the echoes and strands that insist
Nevada Days by Bernardo Atxaga
The new, harsh landscape has an immediate effect on the narrator. Reno, to him, is a place with no peace where he exists in a state of permanent jet lag.