Fiction Archive
The Ensemble by Aja Gabel
Gabel studied cello for years and her experience is evident as she spools out the plot, repeats motifs and varies the story's tempo and dynamics. Music dictates the structure of the book, too, which is arranged in four parts, like a concerto, with a short coda at the end.
Night Beast and Other Stories by Ruth Joffre
Joffre achieves fluidity by refusing labels, marrying concrete sensory details to emotions, and using elements of fabulism and magical realism. Taken together, the effect is dreamlike, but never serene.
A Theory of Love by Margaret Bradham Thornton
The novel, which shifts third-person perspective between two lovers, reveals the impossibility of ever fully knowing someone when thoughts are inscrutable even to the people thinking them.
A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley
In A Lucky Man, Jamel Brinkley’s stunning debut collection, the stories are not formally linked, and yet they are, implicitly, by their beautiful prose, by their intimate gaze at character, by their focus on black men, by their setting in New York City.
Leïla Slimani’s The Perfect Nanny and the Perils of Female Desire
“The baby is dead. It only took a few seconds.” So begins Leïla Slimani’s French bestseller, translated into English by Sam Taylor. The thriller won France’s Prix Goncourt—Moroccan-born Slimani is only the twelfth woman to win the award—and uses an American news story as its source.
West by Carys Davies
There is a pathos and also an infuriating self-indulgence to the central protagonist, Cy, obsessed with finding lost dinosaurs, rumours of which abound, in the lands beyond the Mississippi.
Dictionary Stories by Jez Burrows
Inherent to Dictionary Stories is the question of what makes an ideal sentence that best reveals the meaning of a word.
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
The Female Persuasion never disappoints: there are twists and turns that keep us guessing, new voices to take on the storytelling task, and heartbreak as friends and lovers disappoint, deceive, and part ways.
Let’s No One Get Hurt by Jon Pineda
Jon Pineda’s new novel has a vaguely apocalyptic feel, but the only apocalypse is a personal one for sixteen-year-old Pearl, as she comes of age while navigating a completely male world and its undercurrents of violence.
Awayland by Ramona Ausubel
It’s great fun to watch Ausubel’s enormous imagination at work and to share the joy that emerges from her writing. That said, the strongest, and most haunting, stories in the collection make the magical real as they examine loss.