It starts with a fridge and ends with spilled milk. David Ryan will turn the objects around your house into weapons: A cartoon logo, a thrifted shirt, a ringing phone, a fable read as a wordless lullaby, all become tools that plumb the psyche in his second short story collection, Alligator. In one piece, a […]
“I can lie to you, but it would break the sacred bond of storytelling,” says Susie Vogelman, the unreliable nineteen-year-old NYU dropout and struggling artist at both the center and periphery of Kill Dick, Luke Goebel’s second novel. At times Susie tells her story directly, in first person, then breaks the fourth wall, letting the […]
As the U.S. government actively rounds up and incarcerates immigrants and children of immigrants in euphemistically-named “detention centers” in remote regions of the country, Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Questions 27 & 28 could not feel more timely. The title refers to two particularly divisive and consequential questions on a loyalty questionnaire distributed to Americans of […]
What happens in this book? 2008: A Novel follows Stevie and Sam, former high school sweethearts whose lives have quietly unraveled in adulthood. When a tragedy brings them back into each other’s orbit, both are forced to confront the distance between who they once were and who they’ve become. Set against the cultural and economic […]
“Why Sea? Why Poison?” asks Cumin Baleen, the narrator of Caren Beilin’s novel Sea, Poison: “There is no actual sea in Philadelphia. Only a veritable sea of hospitals. The medical professionals in their blue and green scrubs aquamarize all our city, at all hours. The flow of medicine, blood, and bedding. There’s poison.” This flow […]
“Poems are pathetic and diaries are pathetic. Really, literature is pathetic,” declares Eileen Myles in the introduction to their 2022 anthology Pathetic Literature. To anyone who’s ever tried to hand a feeling over to language, this provocation is, in fact, a form of praise. For Myles, the pathetic is neither shameful nor unspeakable. Rather, it […]
Although I may not reach my annual reading goal for the first time since 2016, there was one book I read twice this year. That’s All I Know, the novel by Elisa Levi and translated by Christina MacSweeney, accompanied me like a companion at the end of the world. After all, for Little Lea, the […]
Vanessa Saunders’ The Flat Woman, an experimental novel and winner of the 2025 FC2 Ronald F. Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize, can be loosely summed up as a novel documenting the fragmentation and dysmorphia of postmodern life. However, this novel warrants a far closer look as an innovative example of overturning the commonplace of form defining […]
There are only three characters in The Last Way, Cameron L. Mitchell’s debut novella: the father, the mother, and our protagonist of undetermined age, the son. Largely set outside of time and place, the trio lack neighbors, extended family, coworkers, or school ties. They exist together (the word “live” would be generous) in a small […]
In the riveting opening story of Carrie R. Moore’s debut collection, a young couple attending a family wedding in Texas Hill Country wonders if their love might be doomed by a family curse, originating with an ancestor who abandoned his partner to escape enslavement. At the story’s close, his descendant, Ever, considers the possible versions […]