Trial and Error Who are we allowed to love? Who should we worship? How do we know who to trust? For the female protagonists in Pak Kyongni’s stories, trying to survive in a patriarchal society ruined by war, the answers can only be found through trial and error while losing much of themselves along the […]
“Words rained all around me,” states our narrator in a moment of loss, clarity, and reverie. “At first a soft drizzle—conjunctions, words that seemed to connect but not describe.” The moment, placed at the start of the novel as the consequence of a dead end, carefully cradles a waning sense of identity and purpose: “Flowing […]
The late Naira Kuzmich’s In Everything I See Your Hand is a startling and provocative debut story collection chronicling the lives of Armenian-Americans in Los Angeles, whose stories defy categorization as they subvert our commonly held notions of what it means to seek a “better life” in America. Kuzmich’s characters navigate loss, generational differences, family […]
Shy is Max Porter’s fourth novel, after Grief is a Thing with Feathers and Lonny, both literature with a magical realist spin. Shy, on the other hand, is contemporary literary fiction which focuses inside the mind of the sixteen-year-old protagonist, Shy. His mind is a sort of (dis)organized chaos as he processes through a mountain […]
Photo by Josh Hild on Unsplash The heat in the living room worked only sometimes, and there was a tangled hairball of exposed wiring in the upstairs bedroom, and the tumbledown stairs that descended from the front porch were crumbling—all this was how Kim could afford to live in the house on Front Street. […]
“Everyone probably gets entangled in a terrible relationship at least once in their life—even people who don’t carry centuries of inherited trauma,” declares the protagonist in poet and performance artist Nancy Agabian’s The Fear of Large and Small Nations. In the novel, a bisexual Armenian American woman in her late thirties, Na, enters a relationship […]
Orphan trains. Discovery of new moss species. Anti/love stories across race, ability, and socioeconomic class. Experimental animal blood transfusions. Leah Angstman’s debut short story collection Shoot the Horses First has delightful, and sometimes gruesome, historical fiction gems to entertain and educate about how far we’ve come as a society—and how far we have yet to […]
Luke Dani Blue’s debut collection Pretend It’s My Body: Stories places trans and queer people’s experiences at center stage in these stories about identity. They blend features of sci-fi, the surreal, horror, and psychological realism to tell the story of what it means to live in between. One of the great strengths of this collection […]
In Chaitali Sen’s A New Race of Men from Heaven, stories trade in understatement rather than flash, and it is this quality of restraint that activates their considerable power. Sen’s precise, unadorned sentences leave ample space between the lines, as if to give her characters sufficient room to navigate life’s challenges. Consider Dhruv, the protagonist […]
Photo by Kovid Rathee on Unsplash I. School, and she can’t breathe, and she forgot her inhaler again. She keeps forgetting, can’t keep things straight. Forgot her lunch last week, twice. The inhaler should stay with the nurse, but she needs it so often that she now keeps it in her desk, takes puffs once […]