Fiction Archive

Art and Autonomy in June Gervais’ Jobs for Girls with Artistic Flair

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June Gervais’s debut novel is a revealing portrait of making your way professionally and personally into adulthood. Gina realizes that her identity is untethered to an outside force such as her dream vocation—a truth some of us take a whole life to find out.

Distraction and Delight in Caio Fernando Abreu’s Moldy Strawberries

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Caio Fernando Abreu’s stories suggest that states of distraction are what allow desire to surface in the first place. They lie somewhere between fables with wry moral lessons and diary entries full of emotional impasses.

Facing the End of the World in Erin Swan’s Walk the Vanished Earth

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Swan acknowledges there will be more than fires and floods to wrestle with as the world ends. People will still fall in love and disappoint each other; children will still long for their mothers and their mothers will still try and fail to protect them.

Surreal and Ordinary Torture in Miguel Bonnefoy’s Heritage

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Miguel Bonnefoy’s prose successfully bears witness to the sheer madness of torture.

Meaningless Craft and Crafting Meaning in Ali Smith’s Companion Piece

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Craft, in Ali Smith’s hand, is malleable. It produces meaning that is disparate from the terms and antecedents of its making.

A Layered History in DeMisty D. Bellinger’s New to Liberty

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DeMisty D. Bellinger’s new novel beautifully showcases the way history endures within us, and how while someone else’s past may influence our present moment, we still have agency.

Desire and Destruction in Kate Folk’s Out There

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Kate Folk’s narrative voice makes even the strangest, most self-destructive desires seem reasonable. Her stories exist between the strange and the familiar, and the ambivalence that characters feel about what they’re doing or what’s happening to them makes them feel all the more real.

Death Rituals and Found Families in Olivia Clare Friedman’s Here Lies

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The natural world is a member of the found family of Friedman's protagonist, and a character she gets to know over the course of the novel. As the world around her is collapsing, she is left to address what still matters.

Personal and Academic Pursuits in Elaine Hsieh Chou’s Disorientation

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Elaine Hsieh Chou’s debut is not only an outrageously enjoyable academic mystery, but also a moving portrayal of self-discovery.

Decay and Rebirth in Irene Solà’s When I Sing, Mountains Dance

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Irene Solà reveals the beauty and brutality of life in a mountain village that holds the scars of the past, but also the seeds of slow repair and renewal.