The characters in Bewildered may never fully understand or control who they ultimately are, but Panciera’s stories suggest that this is really not the goal. We place our stake in the ground not to say, This is who I am, but only This is me in relationship to others. Like the proverbial tree in the forest, if we fall, it doesn’t matter if we make a noise if there is no one there to hear us.

Ever Yrs is an outward expression of one character’s introspection—the background of her very self as composed from the faces of those people who came before, especially her mother and father, her siblings, her husband, and even her somewhat estranged granddaughter.

In this novel, an unflappably confident teenaged girl prevails—through her ingenuity, wit, and a complicated system of self-defense moves—over each threat placed in her way.

In a moment when literary short fiction sometimes seems to be getting shorter and shorter, the stories in Jerry Gabriel’s second story collection, The Let Go, feel luxuriously long.

Lies, First Person is an extremely ambitious novel, which in the end does not lend itself to firm or lasting conclusions. Hareven has produced a work of dramatic and impressive contradictions. Between the two poles of questionable truth and falsehood, she examines such weighty issues as sin, guilt, forgiveness, Judaism, Christianity, motherhood, womanhood, violence, and especially the limitations and possibilities of art.