“Chu’s greatest accomplishment through his stories of clean, well-lighted spaces is his gift for telegraphing a message of understanding, of giving the benefit of the doubt, and above all, of respecting those around us”: Michael A. Ferro reviews Vincent Chu’s debut collection, Like a Champion, out now from 7.13 Books.
“Each one of these stories—each of these characters—leans heavily on another”: Christi Craig reviews Yang Huang’s new collection of linked stories, My Old Faithful, winner of the University of Massachusetts’s Juniper Prize for Fiction.
“It’s these aetherial worlds referred to in the title, these never-existing possibilities that Tolstaya explores through her writing. Texts, stories, are the essences that construct our lives. Whether consciously or unconsciously, whether intentionally fabricating or telling our version of the truth, we’re creating, with language, a narrative.”
“What’s a good fabulist to do when every day the world offers as reality, posits as entirely normal, the surreal images of our nightmares?”: Hasanthika Sirisena reviews Ramona Ausubel’s latest collection, Awayland, out now from Riverhead Books.
“They thrive under repeated analysis”: Jennifer Audette grapples with the twelve stories that make up Nafissa Thompson-Spires’s debut collection, Heads of the Colored People, out now from 37ink/Atria.
“The strongest characters in this book are the ones who are most adrift, most ready to latch onto whatever comes next, and this makes them both tragic and dangerous”: Steve Wingate on Maxim Loskutoff’s debut collection.
“Remember, as you read this small book, generally and specifically about love, remember that suffering is, after all, the Latin root for passion”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on Julian Barnes’s new novel.
“From the novel’s outset, Indian Horse announces itself as the story of a generation, not merely of a single individual’s life”: Steven Wingate on Richard Wagamese’s final novel.
“What color is a heartbeat? What does a word taste like? What is the fragrance of happiness?” Julian Anderson reviews Andreas Izquierdo’s recent novel, The Happiness Bureau, translated from the German by Rachel Hildebrandt.
“In Slimani’s novel, the burden placed upon women to care for children balances alongside the treatment and perceptions of immigrant women. And rendering these issues to subtext, rather than treating them head-on and politically, the narrative forces the reader to become complicit in the shoddy treatment of others for the sake of convenience and creature comforts.”
From the Archives: “The narrator has spent most of her life in other people’s shadows, but through her storytelling asserts an identity that’s no longer tethered to another, one released only by disgrace.”
“Beard’s story explores a unique domestic backstory in the development of the atomic bomb as experienced by both witting and unwitting participants.”
