Sejal Shah’s intrepid short story collection "How to Make Your Mother Cry" is a polysemous encounter connecting auditory and visual modes. Interspersed with ephemera—memory-photographs, childlike drawings, Indian dance notations, a... Read More

Written during COVID-19 lockdowns, "Off the Tracks" is an enchanting, lyrical reflection on memory, travel, and passenger trains. In her engaging travel book, Pamela Mulloy describes COVID-19 as a time when we “all had to learn what... Read More

Set in the Netherlands, Jaap Robben’s novel "Afterlight" is about an elderly woman’s work to discover what happened to her child. In the book’s present, Frieda is in her eighties. After her husband, Louis, dies, she is deemed too... Read More

In the funny and harrowing short stories of Joan Leegant’s excellent collection Displaced Persons, characters navigate myriad forms of displacement, from putting a new life together after divorce to finding their place in an adopted... Read More

Set in the Canadian tundra and propelled by a twenty-five-year-old mystery, Gerard Beirne’s exquisite novel "The Thickness of Ice" is a love story that’s also about culpability and redemption. Jack, Wade’s best friend and a... Read More

The freedom to live life on its own terms is at stake in Omar Youssef Souleimane’s novel "The Last Syrian", about the Arab Spring in Syria. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in desperation over the situation in his native... Read More

An incurable, inexplicable condition brings humanity to the breaking point in Kevin Prufer’s novel "Sleepaway". They call it “the sleeps.” This strange phenomenon works its way across the world, forcing whole communities asleep for... Read More

"Arctic Traverse" is a captivating memoir about a fifty-eight-day trek across remote arctic terrain in northern Alaska. During his “990-mile summer,” Michael Engelhard backpacked and floated the length of the Brooks Range, from the... Read More