Moving from the recent past into the future, Sara Batkie’s short story collection "Better Times" traverses lives that are subtly or drastically twisted away from what is familiar. Mystery and surrealism underlie the mundane, their... Read More

“How easily the fictions that a closed circle of people told each other could grow wings, take flight as if they were the truth,” declares “Deception,” the opening story in Anita Felicelli’s "Love Songs for a Lost Continent".... Read More

Mother Simorq—equal parts witness, healer, and wise woman—offers a visionary alternative for women who transcend painful histories. Azadeh Azad’s "Thus Speaks Mother Simorq" gives voice to a mythological Persian bird woman. In... Read More

The experiences and disquieting realizations of black women come through "Training School for Negro Girls", in which Washington, DC, and its surroundings are treated with tension and tenderness. Spanning girlhood to adulthood, these... Read More

Delving into fractured families, hoarded secrets, and the cultural and personal negotiations at the heart of the Asian American experience, May-lee Chai’s "Useful Phrases for Immigrants" is distinguished by writing as elegant and... Read More

Micah Perks’s "True Love and Other Dreams of Miraculous Escape" contains plot twists inside of plot twists. Interconnected short stories reveal how characters’ inner battles to find love and to be loved create a world of conflict,... Read More

Chaya Bhuvaneswar’s stories are brooding, precise, and painful indictments of patriarchal cultures. They primarily follow women of color through harsh personal and postcolonial landscapes. Characters navigate the expectations and... Read More

Teresa Solana’s short story collection The First Prehistoric Serial Killer is darkly amusing and always entertaining. Its depictions of various criminal schemes and instances of murder range from realistic to fantastical. All of the... Read More