Fiction Archive
The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada
Oyamada’s new novel is a tale of inaction rather than revolt, a story about the warm, velvety embrace of production models. Her characters seem exemplars of a particularly post-millennial brand of jaded helplessness, one that’s the result of living lives in the shadow of exploitative labor systems so all-encompassing
Last of Her Name by Mimi Lok
In Mimi Lok’s debut story collection, the characters are linked in their sense of displacement and isolation, both connected to and separate from their families and their shared histories.
Girl by Edna O’Brien
Edna O’Brien performs a sort of tight-rope act, strung between the stream-like nature of her prose and the painful shards of her story. Brutality stomps through the pages of her new novel, astonishing in its recurrence and terrifying in the variable justifications that underpin it.
Rerun Era by Joanna Howard
In her new memoir, Joanna Howard questions a world where suffering is only acceptable when it is entertaining, when it is something people can watch again and again.
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
Coates’ debut novel builds stories within stories, revisiting pre-Civil War America through the eyes of a survivor of the slave trade.
Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
Danticat doles out prickly investigations of transnational identity that are thickened by circumstance and mucked up by globalization.
The Memory Police by Yōko Ogawa
Ogawa could have written a political thriller but opts instead for a closer look at communities under siege by the very political forces that should be protecting them.
History. A Mess. by Sigrún Pálsdóttir
Sigrún Pálsdóttir’s new novel is an enlightening critique of the constraints and pressures of modern scholarship. The book makes no claim to providing any answers but instead settles comfortably in the personal. In other words, it’s a diagnosis, not a treatment.
Costalegre by Courtney Maum
Maum’s coming-of-age novel probes the hypocrisy of the art world, the challenges of being a child of artists, and the dangers of not being loved.
The Wind that Lays Waste by Selva Almada
There is a bit of incompleteness in every human soul, Almada seems to suggest.