Readers should be aware that, while Emmons’s work has a beautiful complexity, it is also challenging.

The characters in this collection are steeling themselves against familial change, a familiar conceit in contemporary short fiction which Comba handles with the grace and empathy of a veteran writer.

If you seek a guide—on coming of age, lost love, temptations both resisted and surrendered to, and the need to both engage with and respect the planet—Weed’s book is a good choice.

We are both flesh and spirit, alone and together, and our lives are a constant struggle to balance these conflicting states. Crawford’s deeply moving novel details our struggles to find that balance.

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.