Wins and Losses
Although the stories are packed with people and dialogue, and laughter, there are also moments of affecting silence, of reflection or metaphor.
Massive, Cleansing Fire
Made up of individual stories, each one ending in a fire or focused on accounts of those caught up in a wildfire apocalyptic event, this is a creative, provocative, and refreshingly different sort of book.
Rock Salt and Rabbit
June 1969. Quang Ngai Province. Vinh An, a village at the mouth of Song Tra Bong. The days were sweltering, leaning into each other like unbathed bodies.
Bardo or Not Bardo
Volodine’s novel is energetic, offbeat, fast-paced, and shows an off-kilter sense of humor. He writes with a comic purpose, populating his world with strange characters and inexplicable events and outcomes.
Children of the Country
Set in a depressed blue-collar community in the isolated backcountry of Arkansas, the novel depicts inhabitants’ struggles with drugs, abuse, and discrimination, and their search for an escape from deprivation and a foreseeable life of crime.
The White Swallow
The language is compressed, carefully wrought, every sentence doing the work of many.
Neon Green
…the presence of the alien ship never overwhelms the meat of the story, a heartfelt slice of life told through alternating perspectives of a nuclear family in the ’90s.
The Gustav Sonata
Tremain paints her picture of post-war Switzerland with care and steadiness, and the reader can’t help but surrender to the landscape and the authorial voice.
Seeing Red
One evening in New York, Lina Meruane’s body “seize[s] up” and leaves her “paralyzed, [her] sweaty hands clutching at the air.” Just as she reaches to her purse to pick up an insulin shot, a “firecracker” goes off in her head . . .
Road Trip
In text segments set apart by eerie black and white photographs and simple headings, the Starks, a Minnesota farming family, first by how and when they died, and then by who they were when living.