First-person narration is a slippery position to speak from. The reader may come to know a character from the inside, but the one-sided perspective may obstruct other vantage points from which to understand the story. In The Great Gatsby, alternately, hearing the story from Nick Carraway doesn’t bring readers closer to understanding Carraway so much […]
Desire, guilt, and self-destruction drive the subversive narrative of Peter Stenson’s 2024 novel, We, Adults, which unfolds through multiple perspectives in a disastrous love triangle, culminating in newfound understandings of regret. This character-driven story follows Elliot Svendson, a twenty-nine-year-old mother, who returns to her hometown with her young child to start over after discovering her […]
“Almost as soon as I began, it was obvious I was too rusty,” relates the narrator of “Happiness,” a story in Marian Crotty’s excellent new collection, Near Strangers. On the verge of being dumped by her first girlfriend, she hopes to find solace in the trumpet to which she dedicated so much of her early […]
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 […]