The novel is a showcase for Allio’s many talents, including her incisive use of language. Allio has a story to tell, but the anomalous poetics of her prose is the guiding light of the narrative, both revealing and concealing elements of plot—essentially beguiling the reader to turn the page.
Not even a year later, he and Kelvin had moved to San Francisco because he understood by then that he was not cut out to be part of a happy family either. Each month, Kelvin’s parents drove into the city to stay with them, and Phil wondered whether they knew that they were the reason for the move.
Carefully crafted tales of the supernatural, thought-provoking introspection, and relentless black humor can be found in this eclectic new collection from American author and professor emeritus at Boston College, Michael C. Keith.
Yozo struggles throughout the novel with social mores and his interactions with others—he wishes he could no longer care, no longer feel so obligated to fit into society. This kind of self-consciousness is overwrought and tortured, but it’s also devastatingly human.
The tense and atmospheric story, enlivened by Celtic lore, Appalachian legends, and killer zombies, captures the reader’s attention from the outset, beginning with the intriguing emergence from a deep, coal mine crater of the central character, a hapless government auditor named Darrick MacBrehon.
Bernardo Atxaga (1951-) is unquestionably Basque Country’s most prominent author in terms of editorial success and critical acclaim, and he has become not only one of Spain’s leading writers of fiction but also an influential voice for Basque cultural identity inside and outside of Europe.
Set in modern-day America, Rosson’s impressive, character-driven fantasy is focused on two tortured souls, both haunted by past transgressions and both seeking atonement.
Wall examines the darker alleys of human existence and the more questionable seams of Irish culture, politics, and social life, with tough-mindedness and compassion ironically well matched. He is rightly described as an insufficiently known Irish master whose work is astonishingly tender, eerie and, yet, full of human anguish and promise.
In Mark Mayer’s impressive debut collection of short stories, a circus or aerialist never actually makes an appearance. Mayer deftly applies the theme obliquely instead, letting the associations around the circus stand in for what is just beyond our reach, for the freak inside us, for our vanishing acts in relationships and in death.
Rogoff casts his characters’ lives through the various looking glasses of memory, memoir, and myth until none of the characters—and least of all the reader—can be sure of the details, only their profound importance. The facts remain shrouded, but the consequences pierce the dark, loud as a loon’s call, shattering moments of quiet reflection and startling narrator and reader alike into new states of understanding. There is vanity in thinking one knows another person, and Ezra must confront the unrecognizable heart of his closest friend in order to discover a new and deeper intimacy. It is here, in the gap between objective and subjective, rational and intuitive, that subtler truths emerge.