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 language is compressed, carefully wrought, every sentence doing the work of many.
…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.
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.
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 . . .
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.
Matthew Binder’s High in the Streets is a transgressive novel packed full of self-destruction and self-flagellation.
The fourteen stories in the collection, all set in New Mexico, peer under society’s stones to examine the lives of some of its most invisible members.
Danish writer Josefine Klougart has written an evocative, eerie novel of love and injury in One of Us Is Sleeping.
Pike and Bloom, winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Prize at Lake Forest College, is an impressive debut novel by author Matthew Nye.