This tale has such heartfelt realism that the reader might confuse it with nonfiction. The book is cleverly written in first person with the prologue immediately focusing on the plight of whether the earth is “renewed or destroyed”... Read More

Short story collections are tricky beasts, mixing many lives in a unifying style, be the tone wry, solemn, anxious, or deadpan. In this, her second collection after The Circles I Move In, Lefer might be narrating a museum’s audiotape,... Read More

Everyone familiar with Dickens’ A Christmas Carol remembers Jacob Marley: the ghostly partner who came to warn Ebenezer Scrooge to change his ways lest Scrooge suffer the same fate. What fate was it? Only alluded to by the reference of... Read More

When narrator Frederick Quist phones his recently deceased father’s home, Quist, “half expecting him to answer the phone” gets Isabel instead, “his fourth and last wife, by whom he had had four girls in a vain attempt to replace... Read More

No woman wants to hear that she is her mother’s daughter, yet she is. Oates and Berliner have collected an album of seventeen candid snapshots of mother-daughter life. These stories, by prominent, international women writers, explore... Read More

In the lead story of McFerrin’s balanced and eloquent collection of short stories, a woman receives a curious fruit, called a Buddha’s hand, in the mail from a friend in Asia. The two sides of the fruit resemble hands in prayer, and... Read More

With a mouth foul enough to match her appearance, Billimba the Witch shatters Allen Jenson’s hope of a quiet retreat at his mountain cabin. She crashes on his roof and decides to stay because Allen is the first mortal who has dared to... Read More

Dirk Arendt, the main character of Murray’s engaging historical adventure tale, shares a literary lineage with both Hawkeye from The Last of the Mohicans and Indiana Jones. This Cape Colony Dutchman is a scout too, with equal parts... Read More