Dan Keane talks with J. Robert Lennon about his new book, Familiar, as well as oversharing, life online, and the perils of writing from the gut.

In her thoughtful, entertaining new collection, Signs and Wonders, Alix Ohlin lures readers into what seem like lulls, and then, there it is: a car crash. A coma. A missing child. A man licking a woman’s leg.

Ever feel like reading genre without, you know, knowing what to expect? Cam Terwilliger on why Percival Everett’s Assumption—one volume, three mystery novellas—will kick your [ahem] assumptions to the curb.

A good place to die? Mary François Rockcastle’s second novel In Caddis Wood unfolds as call and response between a husband facing terminal illness, and his wife of more than thirty years. What does it look like to draw strength from a shared past, even as the future dwindles?

Tyler McMahon loves short stories but worries that collections might be the worst thing to have happened to the genre. However, books like Alan Heathcock’s Volt renew his faith in the collection as an art form of its own, one that makes its stories inseparable from one another—greater even than the sum of their parts.

J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand is a collection of 100 linked short short stories–linked by their location, a small upstate New York town that resembles Lennon’s hometown of Ithaca, and by their narrator, described as “unemployed, and satisfied to be unemployed.”

Michael Hinken asks Young Lions Fiction Award winner Salvatore Scibona about the story behind his first novel, The End. Scibona emphasizes the value of writing from habit (rather than discipline), discusses his own process, and shares why he recently built a worm farm.