Down the Rabbit Hole – Juan Pablo Villalobos
Like its pintsize narrator, this novel divulges an unnerving inner darkness beyond its dainty exterior.
A Working Theory of Love – Scott Hutchins
Only in San Francisco, a city living in perpetual danger of the power of the San Andreas Fault, could love be seen as a “territory all its own[,] prone to seismic trickery.”
Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures – Emma Straub
It all happens like a Disneyland ride, one where the reader is buckled into a narrow cart and pushed along on a track past miniature scenes backed by relentlessly tinkling music.
For all his supposed nihilism and self-proclaimed untaggability, Eliot’s story is archetypal.
How To Get Into the Twin Palms – Karolina Waclawiak
A book trying to say something that cannot be said directly. A book so full of spaces between clouds.
Battleborn – Claire Vaye Watkins
The stories drift around in time and history, homing in on characters who are subtly — or not so subtly — processing violence, death, or detachment.
The Age of Miracles – Karen Thompson Walker
Walker’s prose, like her imagining, is competent, but also rather predictable.
What Happened to Sophie Wilder – Christopher R. Beha
Filled with characters who live and breathe literature, the novel buzzes like a late-night conversation, dizzy with ideas.
Bad personality, bad prose, and sexism aside, the narrator’s anxieties about how to novelize history are legitimate.
The Land of Decoration – Grace McCleen
Judith’s preoccupations with death are more about her longing for a perfect world, one that she creates in miniature on the floor of her bedroom and calls “the Land of Decoration.”