The romance of nine days aboard the Pullman Hotel Express gives way to disenchantment when violence on the frontier forces women to choose between silence and freedom. A Transcontinental Affair, Jodi Daynard’s elegant historical novel,... Read More

Victoria Williamson’s "The Boy with the Butterfly Mind" is a story about acceptance and empathy. In Scotland, eleven-year-old Elin lives with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, Paul. She thinks that if she can just be perfect,... Read More

Two men bond over sex, violence, and shared emotional and psychological trauma in Orlando Ortega-Medina’s neo noir "The Death of Baseball", about identity, sexuality, and nihilism in 1980s Los Angeles. The novel is a study of... Read More

Brutal realism marks the turns of this coming-of-age novel, set during the 1990s drug boom. The city of Fury is both a haven and a hell for the teens who call it home. In Corey Croft’s gritty novel "The Furies", a crew of friends are... Read More

Debates over whether or not animals are self-aware beings can get heated, and deciding that they are would require major legal and ethical changes in how they are treated. In "The Soul Life of Animals", Hanne Jahr takes a metaphysical... Read More

In João Reis’s melancholy yet comic The Translator’s Bride, a nameless translator in a nameless city struggles to interpret his own life, wandering through a frustrating maze of streetcars, chilling rain, and moldy interiors. His... Read More

In the fifteen stories of Toni Kan’s short story collection "Nights of the Creaking Bed", characters in contemporary Nigeria navigate struggles including family situations to government corruption. These short sketches—sometimes... Read More

Cult favorite Jung Young Moon’s "Seven Samurai Swept Away in a River" is a meditation on the nature of existence that’s mediated through the question of what constitutes a novel. It is a “story about Texas, but at the same time, a... Read More