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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Dhruv found this faux French restaurant—a restaurant of sorts but perhaps more of a cafeteria—off the bypass road of a highway called Research Boulevard, close to his hotel. There were many of these restaurants all over the southern and midwestern states to which Dhruv traveled for work, and he had eaten in most of them. […]
Though reductive and imperfect, it’s not so inaccurate to describe good fiction as the conscientious charting of interesting mistakes. By that metric, Katherine Hill’s debut novel, The Violet Hour, succeeds in nearly every measure.
Each of Gerkensmeyer’s thirteen stories envisions an altered reality, a place nearly identical to realistic American life with a single cog gone wonky.