Rubén Degollado’s resonant novel "The Family Izquierdo" maps three generations within a Mexican family on the Texas side of the Rio Grande. A family tree orients the reader among the book’s large, mixed ensemble, whose members are... Read More

J. A. Mensah’s "Castles from Cobwebs" is a haunting coming-of-age tale. Imani is a Ghanaian orphan who was left on a castle incline in Northumbria. Picked up by the reverend mother of a convent, Imani is raised there, experiencing... Read More

The intertwining of the personal and the political is at the heart of Christie Hodgen’s "Boy Meets Girl", a smart, funny novel. In 1992, rich Ben meets poor-ish Sam in a New Hampshire sandwich shop. Ben is working on a political... Read More

Lars Mytting’s "The Sixteen Trees of the Somme" is an intricate and evocative literary mystery about an orphaned Norwegian man whose family history is caught in between two world wars and the German Jewish sides of WWII. Growing up on... Read More

Spotlighting male fragility, the stories of Christopher Evans’s "Nothing Could Be Further from the Truth" show uncomfortable negotiations with the truth of feelings and circumstances. A jealous man wears sneakers belonging to his... Read More

Reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Manon Steffan Ros’s "The Blue Book of Nebo" is an elegant, elegiac novel that tempers the enormity of nuclear Armageddon with personal, intimate relationships. Rowenna and her... Read More

Set in Karachi, the fourteen short stories of Farah Ali’s stunning and soulful "People Want to Live" are tales of bumpy lives steeped in poverty, bleakness, violence, and despair. The devastations within interior lives are highlighted... Read More

Distance, psychological and physical, runs through Ethel Rohan’s short story collection In The Event of Contact. Here, contact, or the lack thereof, signals loss, emptiness, and need. Meanwhile, intimacy is a double-edged sword. In... Read More