Favorite New Fiction
from Small and Micro Publishers

This entertaining and deeply affecting novel-in-stories, set in 1919, immerses us in the lives and travails of various members of Doc Bell’s Miracles and Mirth Medicine Show, a traveling ensemble of musicians, acrobats, and other performers who, depending on chemistry or circumstance, find love or discord, common cause or conflict, with their fellow show members. Allen takes us into the heart of these relationships, and into the interior lives of individual characters, creating an illuminating and satisfying experience for readers.

The title of this layered and compassionate novel echoes a question that is often asked in the wake of a tragedy: “How might things have been different if _____ hadn’t occurred?” While the novel considers such what-ifs, it is mainly concerned with real consequences–in particular, the ways in which a tragic, unexpected loss upends the plans and dreams of the people it affects, leaving them to try to reassemble their broken lives. By weaving together the stories of multiple characters who are affected by such a loss, Fox portrays this process with insight and empathy, and shows how it can deliver unanticipated gifts.

More often than we might care to admit, we enter marriage or other committed relationships with more haste than reflection; we move forward without clearly thinking things through or fully imagining what a future with this partner might look like given what we know (or sense) about them and ourselves.

In her painfully honest, witty, and perceptive new novel, And So We Die, Having First Slept, Jennifer Spiegel acknowledges this reality without judgment, and without suggesting that such relationships are necessarily doomed. Instead, through the struggles of the married couple at the center of the novel, Spiegel makes the case that it’s never too late to confront the most difficult truths about our partners and ourselves, which offers at least the hope of transformation or redemption—something denial never does.

With poetic and often searing language, the stories in Fayeza Hasanat’s début collection, The Bird Catcher, illuminate the struggles of Bangladeshi and Bangladeshi-American women—struggles that are often rooted in misogyny or other forms of prejudice. Throughout the stories run threads of resistance: a necessity of living with lasting, systemic oppression, and cause now and then for glimmers of hope.

The central characters in Thomas Benz’s thought-provoking, offbeat, and often hilarious story collection Home & Castle experience several varieties of alienation–from neighbors, from casual acquaintances, from co-workers, and sometimes from their own romantic partners. Not infrequently, this alienation derives at least in part from their own mistakes and disgruntlements. Yet in their resistance to this isolation, or to its consequences, the characters can’t help but earn our empathy–and, sometimes, even our cheers.

How do we attain and hold onto happiness? Although this question has been the implied or overt subject of countless self-help books, it has no neat or simple answers. The stories in Virginia Pye’s compelling new collection, Shelf Life of Happiness, acknowledge this reality in fresh and perceptive ways. And they allow us to witness transformational moments in the lives of characters who are seeking out happiness or life satisfaction, or struggling with its elusiveness.

Timothy Gager’s captivating new collection of flash fiction, Every Day There Is Something About Elephants, immerses us in revelatory episodes or situations from a range of lives. All the stories, even the more surreal ones, capture truths about human experience, with all its darkness, absurdity, and moments of recognition.