An aspiring activist has rude awakenings during his efforts to effect change in the revealing coming-of-age novel "Proles". In Barry Bergman’s thoughtful bildungsroman "Proles", an idealistic young man endures industrial labor in 1970s... Read More

Poignant and ethereal, the fantasy novel "Mancala Moon" follows a man’s quest for intergenerational understanding in the mysterious woods. With hints of magical realism, Asa Bowers’s fantasy novel "Mancala Moon" follows a young man... Read More

The interlinked short stories of Urszula Honek’s unapologetically stark novella "White Nights" focus on ordinary lives that are subject to savage turns of fate. There are beautiful days in Binarowa, Poland, where the sky goes aflame... Read More

A tale of family discord set in the context of centuries of Serbian upheavals, Gail Sidonie Šobat’s magic-infused feminist novel "Songs From This and That Country" is wrenching yet hopeful. In the fourteenth century, Sudbina, the... Read More

Across a span of decades, people either evade or take risks when it comes to the loves and lives they desire in the affecting novel "Scarlet Birthright", about a determined family’s efforts to forgive. Scarlet Ibis James’s haunting... Read More

Illumined by tones of animal advocacy, "The Umwelt of Iwar" is a novel that records the ills of the horse-racing industry via one observant horse. In "The Umwelt of Iwar", Daniel J. Donoghue’s introspective novel about animal cruelty,... Read More

A passionate couple from different sides of the Soviet divide avoids discussing their inevitable rifts in Yelena Moskovich’s sultry, wrenching novel-in-verse, "Nadezhda in the Dark". During a “black-milk,” mournful winter, as... Read More

About the value of travels abroad, "Bergen Spring" is a warm coming-of-age novel. Following his brother’s death, a man goes on a backpacking trip in Michael Cummings’s contemplative novel "Bergen Spring". In 1973, Erik, a theater... Read More