Category: Fiction

“Like a river that overflows its banks, it spreads sideways rather than carves its way forward, plot-wise” (32). So says the narrator of Kehua!, an author-character who is writing a “tale of murder, adultery, incest, ghosts, redemption and remorse” that sprawls instead of rushing along (15). The book is split between the author-character’s own experience…

“The first annoying thing is when I ask Dad what he thinks happened to Mom, he always says, “What’s most important is for you to understand it’s not your fault.” You’ll notice that wasn’t even the question” (3). This is how Where’d You Go, Bernadette starts: with Bee Branch letting us know that her mom…

These twenty-six stories by H.H. Munro, who wrote under the pen-name of Saki, are selections from five volumes that were originally published between 1904 and 1919. They’re all fairly funny, though I found the first few stories the weakest. In those early stories, like “Reginald at the Carlton” or “Reginald on Besetting Things,” we’re reading…

I saw the cover of this novel on CoverSpy and really liked the Brownstone-Brooklyn-meets-Hokusai design, so when I saw it at the library, I checked it out. The first-person narrator is sixty-ish Seido Oda, who was born in a small village in the mountains in rural Japan: he tells of how his parents were innkeepers,…

This collection of fifteen short stories (which I heard about via Goodreads then saw at the library) has been good jury duty reading, by which I mean it’s light and easy enough that I could comfortably read it during breaks, even if several simultaneous conversations were happening around me. “Light and easy,” though, isn’t necessarily…

There’s a piece in what purpose do i serve in your life called “cybersex” that consists mostly of screenshots of Facebook chats between Marie Calloway and one or more interlocutors, with the other party’s name/photo blocked out. In one of these conversations, in which a guy talks about wanting to be rough with her, Marie…

The No Variations (originally published in Spanish in 2007), is described in Darren Koolman’s Translator’s Preface as “an omnium gatherum of obscure references, cryptic anagrams, parenthetical remarks, indecipherable aide-mémoire, overblown critical extracts, imperfectly-wrought poems, bewildering drafts of unfinished stories, characters with unpronounceable names…everything, in other words, a reader might expect to find in the diary…

The Ring (which was originally published in French in 1994) is the story of a man adrift. At the start of the book, Quentin Corval’s lover announces she’s leaving him for his brother. They’re off to America, where Quentin’s brother has landed a teaching job. “I’m leaving too,” Quentin says, all bluster (7.) Pressed, he…