Belonging. A powerful word. Just reading “belonging” can stir up strong emotions. There may be no greater comfort than feeling valued within one’s country, community, or family. But what happens when people don’t feel at home in their environments or even in their own skin? When they can’t find their physical or emotional place? Such […]

First encounters with sexual feelings and relationships can be a clumsy, bewildering mix of indescribable pleasure and discomfort. In her slim, remarkable novella Cecilia, K-Ming Chang uses surreal, strikingly original and surprising prose to describe that experience in the context of queer-girl desire. In language rich with unsettling and arresting imagery, a twenty-four-year-old narrator revisits […]

According to Alice Nighthawk, one of the principal characters in Amy Frykholm’s debut novel High Hawk, “Wakan ye ja” are the Lakota words for children, translating as: “They are too sacred.” The implication seems to be that there is something fearful about children, that their innocence and vulnerability—their sacredness—is too much, that it becomes terrifying […]

In the first two lines of her debut novel Jellyfish Have No Ears, published by Graywolf Press, Adèle Rosenfeld reveals that nothing in her story is as it seems. Her narrator Louise’s mix-up, “It was the Castaigne building. What I’d heard was Castagne,” introduces a central theme of the book: What Louise hears is not […]

The title of Balsam Karam’s novel, The Singularity, is also a description of its formal logic. The book enacts in its plotting, its structure, and its language what happens inside of a black hole, playing out the metaphor across continents, families, and nations. Singularity, Karam explains, brings bodies together in a space of infinite density, […]

An unnamed town with an unnamed narrator are at the center of The Avian Hourglass’s spiraling universe of prose. Starting with chapter 180 and counting down as the narrative progresses, Lindsey Drager’s fourth novel is a surrealist exploration of what it means to move forward in time while exploring the history of ourselves and our […]

In this epic journey through brutalized, fractured communities within the Democratic Republic of the Congo, award-winning writer Mark Jacobs presents an intense and poignant novel of vulnerable outsiders at the peripheries of hell navigating inter-ethnic quarrels, government corruption, and the aftereffects of European imperialism. Jacobs, a former foreign service officer, is a prolific short story […]

Money pervades language. We talk about what our time is worth, whether others will get what they pay for, the cost of our own choices. In literature, too, we speak of the economy of an author’s language. One way to measure a book is to label it a national bestseller, or to gossip about the […]

Aurora Mattia’s first novel, The Fifth Wound, is many books in one. Sarah Gerard calls it “a densely embroidered autofictional mythography,” and Mattia herself has described it as “a scrapbook in the form of a hymn.” The text is filled with literary echoes, pop culture references, and forays into criticism and history that make clear […]