A half-submerged island is the setting of a love story “not meant for land” in "When Water Became Blue", Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette’s sweetly wanton novel about women’s desire. Brought to shore by her partner and child, Anaïs, a... Read More

The world transforms around a strange, charismatic girl who was trained to keep her eyes on the skies in the bizarre, wondrous novel "The High Heaven". Orphaned when the cult she was raised in went out to meet alien angels and instead... Read More

Hearkening back to classics in style, "Reunions" is a weighty literary novel about revealing encounters with old friends. In David Adams Cleveland’s verbose literary novel "Reunions", former classmates see a familiar face at their... Read More

Molly Gaudry’s "Fit Into Me" is a hybrid book that challenges notions of the self, authenticity, reliability, appropriation, and truth. This multigenre work—both a novel-within-a-memoir and a memoir-within-a-novel—follows the... Read More

In Harry Mathews’s literary novel "The Conversions", stories nest, esoterica abound, sentences fail, and gibberish is spoken. A beguiling unnamed narrator with distinguished connections and intellectual leanings attends a gathering... Read More

Sara Gothelf Bloom’s sophisticated novel-in-vignettes "Just Enough to Start Over" is about an artistic German Jewish family in exile from the Nazis. There are three Dubrovsky sisters: Bertha, a talented musician; Annelene, a gifted... Read More

In the linked stories of Jennifer Sears’s uncompromising book "What Mennonite Girls Are Good For", sexual abuse and mental health issues beleaguer a devout family. The stories orbit Ruthie, who spends her 1970s-1980s upbringing in... Read More

Ana Paula Pacheco’s "Pandora" is a startling, bold allegorical novella about pandemic-era hazards to women. COVID-19 upends literature professor Ana’s life. Her classes and her friendship with Alice, with whom she plans a pornography... Read More