Favorite New Fiction
from Small and Micro Publishers

Winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, Grace Talusan’s memoir The Body Papers is, to quote writer Mia Alvar, “an extraordinary portrait of the artist as survivor.”

At age 2, Grace moved with her family from the Philippines to a suburb of Boston, where she became adrift between two worlds. On the one hand, she was made to feel “other” in her predominantly white neighborhood and school; on the other hand, she lost touch with her native language and culture, discovering what happens when “assimilation brings erasure.” In time, Grace confronted additional, traumatizing difficulties: the realization that her family’s residency status was “illegal,” making deportation an ever-present risk; sexual abuse by her paternal grandfather; and in later years, the discovery that she has a gene that makes carriers susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer. Consequently, she had to decide whether, as a preventive measure, to have her breasts and ovaries removed.

In her affecting and fiercely honest memoir, Grace breaks the silence that long surrounded these traumas, discovering what Kirkus Reviews describes as “the healing power of speaking the unspeakable.”

In interviews with the East Coast Asian American Student Union, Fiction Advocate, and The Rumpus, Grace has answered a wide range of questions about The Body Papers, discussing how the book came about, how she connected the various threads of her story, and the care she took in integrating information about living family members. Here, she responds to questions about the process of writing and revising The Body Papers, among other topics. (Full disclosure: Grace, a dear friend, has offered invaluable advice to me as I’ve written and revised my own novels.)

In a clothing shop at a local mall, Jesse Albright turns away from her ten-year-old daughter, Sophie, for a moment. When she turns back, she finds that Sophie has vanished, as if into thin air.

Six years later, as Marlene Adelstein’s gripping and affecting début novel begins, Sophie is still nowhere to be found, and authorities have all but given up on the search for her. But Jesse hasn’t. Although almost everything about Jesse’s life has changed–she’s withdrawn from friends and neighbors, split with Sophie’s father, Cooper, and taken to drinking heavily–she continues to hold out hope that Sophie might be alive, somewhere. And in what Cooper and others see as hoarding caused by grief, Jesse fills the home she once shared with him and Sophie with found objects, seeing them as clues that Sophie has sent her to decipher.

Gilmore Tamny is not just a talented writer but also an accomplished musician and visual artist. She has published poems, stories, essays, interviews, and artwork in a range of print and online publications, and her novel My Days with Millicent, which I highly recommend, has been serialized by Ohio Edit and is available here.

Gilmore has just published a collection of haikus, HAIKU4U, which has earned praise from Daniel Clowes, among many others. Here, she responds to some questions about the haiku form, what it’s allowed her to achieve, and more.

With scope, depth, and feeling, The Book of Jeremiah, Julie Zuckerman’s debut novel in stories, examines pivotal experiences in the long life of a single character, exploring how these experiences shape him, change his perceptions of himself and others, and reverberate across time. The result is a moving, multifaceted portrait of a life, in all its dimensions.

Some of my favorite novels are those in which the setting is integral to the story. In Valerie Nieman’s thrilling, genre-bending novel To the Bones, the richly rendered setting is inseparable from characters’ fears, strengths, and weaknesses and from nearly every tragedy and triumph in the story.

The novel takes place in Redbird, West Virginia, run for generations by a coal-baron family, the Kavanaughs, whose evils run far deeper than their exploitation of the land and its people. To help achieve their ends, the Kavanaughs seem to draw dark, otherworldly powers from the coal, and from the land itself. And these powers appear unstoppable, until a few townspeople, and an outsider with some otherworldly powers of his own, try to fight back–often, with deadly consequences.

Recently, I had the pleasure of reading The Don Con, a comic crime thriller that is being released on April 1^st by Pace Press. The central character, Joey Volpe, is a down-on-his-luck actor whose greatest claim to fame is having played a small role as a mobster on The Sopranos. To leverage that glint of stardom, Joey has taken to signing autographs at pop-culture fan conventions, which seems like a reasonable—and harmless—way to earn some much-needed cash.

That all changes when a real gangster, Tony Rosetti, appears in Joey’s autograph line and extorts him into taking part in a plan to rob celebrities at the next fan con. Everything seems to go Rosetti’s way, until Joey hooks up with an even more scheming crew of criminals and exacts a cleverly concocted form of revenge against Rosetti.

Here, the author of The Don Con, Richard Armstrong, responds to some questions about the inspiration for the book, its sharp revenge plot, the role of Shakespeare in the story, and more.

From the start of this fast-paced thrill ride of a novel, the main character, Jake Halligan, is in danger. A bounty hunter, Jake has made lots of enemies among those who break the law, and even among some who enforce it. So when a body of a young woman turns up in his gun safe, it’s possible that one or more of these foes are trying to frame him, or send him a threatening message.

But as Jake soon discovers, bigger, more powerful forces are arrayed against him, for reasons that reach far back before his bounty-hunting days. And he learns that he is to become not the hunter but the hunted, in a decks-stacked-against-him challenge echoing the one at the heart of the classic short story (and movie) “The Most Dangerous Game.”