To read Ethan Rutherford’s The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories is to give oneself over to an improbable series of events which are immensely absorbing. At the same time that…
Beirut-born Montreal author Rawi Hage has created a richly mysterious and surreally grotesque dream for his third novel, Carnival. The novel’s protagonist and narrator, nicknamed Fly, is a taxi driver in…
The five stories that make up All My Friends, a small collection by Frenchwoman (and Prix Goncourt winner) Marie NDiaye, are stories of breakdown. This breakdown is not necessarily the…
Setting much of the plot in Ghana Must Go—Taiye Selasi’s engaging first novel about two African immigrants and their children—in Boston was an clever choice: A hilly colony established by…
I have, I admit, no idea what Renata Adler’s Speedboat is about. Really, not the foggiest. But this is a very special sort of mystification, an unqualified – maybe even…
Following in the steps of such modern day masters of this intricate form, including Lydia Davis and Kim Chinquee, Scott Garson has embraced it, bringing his own brand of American disharmony often seen in those forbears. The majority of stories in his second collection Is That You, John Wayne? run from a page long to three and they are the crux of this collection bent on exploring the sadness of life, the missed or missing opportunities, and the stasis our collective cultures seemed to have emotionally entered while we fly and speed about with technology that probably has not made us treat each other any better.