Set along the Big Arsenic Springs, a sub-river of the Río Grande, The Annual Big Arsenic Fishing Contest! spans decades of yearly fishing contests held among three best friends.

Part travelogue, part memoir, part novel, this semi-autobiographical and semi-biographical endeavor is multifaceted and blends the various categories so thoroughly that the result is comparable to a rich, smooth-textured cocktail with a faintly peculiar flavor.

This book is ultimately about the numerous hard ways humans survive horrors, not just during the unfolding of terrible events, but also afterward, with guilt acknowledged and not.

Many of the stories involve disillusionment and self-discovery of the type we often find in literary fiction, but there’s a more specific theme that comes up again and again: negligent parenting.

From the opening lines of Saša Stanišić’s Before the Feast, the reader sits as if at the feet of the novel’s storytelling narrator, the first person plural collective voice of a village.

The inherent intimacy of the perspective is one way Nagamatsu infuses the otherworldly with the relatable.

Infused with an element of the fantastical, many of the stories, initially appearing straightforward and grounded in reality, veer off into unexpected, outlandish territory, and, more often than not, characters are not what they seem.

Nowhere is the tension between the “gift” and “test” of West Virginia more deftly drawn than Corcoran’s exploration of the lives of gay characters.

Jarrar’s characters are Muslims, mainly women, usually not living their lives in lockstep with the Quran, but feeling grounded in their religion and culture and home nonetheless.

Valente writes with the ear of a poet and the inquisitive instinct of a journalist.