Favorite New Fiction
from Small and Micro Publishers

Book Reviews

The Through

The Through

In this inventive and affecting novel, the barriers between the real world and the worlds of the imagination, magic, and folklore become porous at best and sometimes dissolve altogether. As disorienting as these breaks with reality are for the couple at the center of the story, Adrian Dussett and Ben Hughes, they ultimately prove revelatory, pushing Adrian and Ben to confront personal difficulties that have troubled them for years and created a divide in their relationship.

Read More

Little Feasts

Little Feasts

The “little feasts” in this darkly intriguing story collection are works of flash fiction that explore a variety of appetites: the kinds that few people would discuss over dinner, but that say much about the scope and strangeness of desire, and about its potential to endanger or save us.

Read More

K: A Novel

K: A Novel

K: A Novel offers a gripping, nuanced exploration of how imprisonment tests a writer–mentally, physically, and morally. Just as compelling is how the novel conveys the writer’s need for self-expression, which never diminishes, even under the most trying circumstances.

Read More

Coal Black

Coal Black

With page-turner plots that take us to dark places, on both sides of the law, Chris McGinley’s rural-noir story collection, Coal Black, is a deeply satisfying read. What makes the book even more captivating is how deeply rooted each story is in the book’s setting: the hills of eastern Kentucky, a place of both natural beauty and human struggle, and to certain of McGinley’s characters, a place where figures from local folklore and legends can sometimes feel just as real–and just as threatening–as a gun-toting thief or drug dealer.

Read More

Tidal Flats

Tidal Flats

In novels or dramas about fraught romantic relationships, the narrative often feels bent toward disintegration, with the possibility–and sometimes the inevitability–of separation looming over every scene. What distinguishes Cynthia Newberry Martin’s début novel, Tidal Flats, is how it deeply it immerses us in one character’s process of figuring out what might be lost or gained by staying in a seriously challenged relationship, or by moving on from it. The outcome of her process never feels certain nor inevitable, and the result is a captivating and illuminating read.

Read More

Ghosts of You

Ghosts of You

In so many stories of women’s murders, both fictional and nonfictional, the emphasis is on the crime and killer, with the women portrayed as little more than victims. Often, we get little sense of who they were and how their loss affects their friends, loved ones, or the wider community. Cathy Ulrich’s arresting new story collection, Ghosts of You, turns this narrative frame on its head, resulting in fiction that is, by turns, haunting, thought-provoking, and deeply moving.

Read More

Twitter

Unable to load tweets. Please try again.

Subscribe by email