George Singleton’s newest short story collection, Wounded Boarders, takes the mundane and presses on all its tender spots. Its setting is thoroughly Southern—geographically, most of the pieces take place in small towns south of the Mason-Dixon line—but the characters are exceedingly relatable in the ways they occupy our uber modern world that always seems one […]
There isn’t a hitch or bump on the road of immersion into Grace Spulak’s fictional world in Magdalena is Brighter Than You Think, winner of the 2025 Autumn House Rising Writer in Fiction Prize. Spulak writes with unsparing sharp focus and a matching terse, nearly catatonic register, about precarious lives irreparably scarred by abuse, poverty, […]
Agnes wants to die. But her suicidal impulse is not an indifferent, sleepy malaise; she is a woman with a vision. She wants to be publicly murdered, and she needs to find exactly the right person to do it. In Hallie Elizabeth Newton’s debut novel, Agnes Lives!, we follow the titular Agnes as she scouts […]
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 […]