Electricity & Other Dreams
These are challenging times for those committed to literary realism.
White Girls
Als challenges not just conventional views of literature but the very approach.
The Land of Motionless Childhood
Other people’s dust didn’t normally bother Kenny, but when Etienne unplugged the hipsters’ television set and gathered the cord to wind into a neat coil, the gray, rat-shaped clump that rode atop the snaking cord had an oiliness, something organic about it that made him flinch.
Night in Erg Chebbi
In July, seven months to the day after her brother’s death, they arrive in Merzouga, Morocco, gateway to the dune sea of Erg Chebbi. The trip is meant to be a healing interlude, a brief escape; by immersing her in this place of exotic sights and sounds, he has hoped to give her a short respite from her grief.
You Only Get Letters from Jail
Jodi Angel’s characters cannot be saved. They cannot get laid. They cannot buy a drink at a bar legally. Instead, they can get in their borrowed or broken-down cars and try to run away, which is what most of the protagonists in Angel’s newest collection of stories, You Only Get Letters From Jail, do—but they never quite escape.
Survival Skills
A greyhound refuses to run. The dog—bred for explosive speed and vicious grace—instead limps and cowers through the opening pages of Jean Ryan’s debut story collection, Survival Skills.
Boneland
Capture the flux of three generations across multiple states. Sketch it out in striking images. Weave it through with the tissues—tight and narrow here, loose and tenuous there—that make up a clan.
If A Stranger Approaches You
Novelist and poet Laura Kasischke knows well the dangers lurking in dark corners of suburbia and explores the myth-like quality of its underbelly in her first story collection, If a Stranger Approaches You.
Corporeality
With deceptive quietness, Hollis Seamon’s second collection of short stories, Corporeality, offers a penetrating look at ten sets of lives. These lives are stunningly beautiful, despite or—in Seamon’s hands—because they are ordinary.
Spectacle
The female narrators in Susan Steinberg’s third short story collection, Spectacle, are direct. They confess. They repeat themselves and contradict, edging closer to an approximation of their experience.